Meta, Microsoft Scale Back Staff Use of Anthropic's Claude

Claude Code use inside Meta has dropped to roughly 30,000 employees, down from about 60,000 earlier this year, The Information reported. Spring layoffs that hit about 10% of Meta's 78,000-person workforce account for part of the decline, but not the bulk of it.

The rest is substitution. Meta's internal coding tool MetaCode has already surpassed 30,000 users, and Muse Code, the external Claude Code competitor Meta began testing in August, counts over 6,000 internal users. "The rapid advancement of Meta's proprietary AI coding tools and its Muse Spark line of models has largely displaced the need for Claude," the reporting says.

Microsoft is on a parallel track. The company projected spending at least $1 billion on Anthropic's technology this year; that estimate "has since been slashed by more than a third," according to The Information. Leadership has asked staff to curb Claude usage and move to Microsoft's own offerings, with engineers in the Experiences and Devices group being migrated onto GitHub Copilot CLI.

The internal pullback is narrower than the headline numbers imply. Microsoft's up-to-$5 billion investment in Anthropic is untouched, as is Anthropic's $30 billion commitment to buy Azure compute capacity, and customer spending on Claude via Azure and Bedrock continues to grow. Meta separately projected spending up to $10 billion a year on Anthropic's models even as Mark Zuckerberg attacked the lab in public.

This is Anthropic's third rough beat inside a week on our tracker. The Pentagon told the BBC it had stopped using Claude, and three senior researchers walked NYMag through their reasons for quitting the lab.