After 'ban' on Claude Code, Microsoft has more 'bad news' for Anthropic
Microsoft is shifting its internal AI infrastructure away from Anthropic's Claude models toward OpenAI's GPT-5.6 to optimize costs and efficiency. The company has implemented strict token budgets for its divisions, effectively ending the widespread use of Claude within its engineering teams.
Why it matters
This move highlights the intense competition between AI model providers and the growing focus on cost-efficiency in enterprise-level AI adoption.
Microsoft spent May telling its Windows, Office and Surface engineers to wind down Claude Code and move to GitHub Copilot CLI before the fiscal year closed on June 30. That looked like a licensing decision, and an expensive one for Anthropic. This week's internal memo suggests the harder blow was still coming.Jay Parikh, the executive vice president who runs Microsoft's CoreAI organisation, wrote to his teams that "tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for," asked engineers to review their own AI spending, and made OpenAI's GPT-5.6 the default model for internal use. 404 Media first reported the memo, which lands at a company that has just posted another record quarter and is still worried enough about its own AI bill to put a ceiling on it.GitHub Copilot's auto-router was quietly sending Microsoft engineers to ClaudeThe default-model line is the part Anthropic will feel.
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