Big companies like Microsoft and Uber are trapped in the trap of AI, technology is becoming more expensive than humans.

veteran American tech company Microsoft has started canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses. The company is now redirecting its engineering staff towards GitHub Copilot CLI. This change comes at a time when the tech giant encouraged large-scale experimentation with AI-assisted coding and opened access to Claude Code to thousands of its developers, project managers, designers and other employees just six months ago. The pace of adoption of Claude Code in the company was quite fast and encouraging. However, this increased the expenditure significantly.

Employees had become dependent on AI

According to a report in The Verge, the massive adoption of the tool by employees has forced the company to step back from the technology on which its own engineers had come to rely. However, this decision will not affect Microsoft’s major commercial deals with Anthropic. The company’s foundry deal includes an investment of up to $5 billion in Anthropic, which gives foundry customers access to Claude models. Along with this, Anthropic’s $30 billion commitment to buy Azure compute capacity will also remain intact.

Uber spent the entire year’s AI budget in just 4 months

Praveen Napalli Naga, chief technology officer of ride-hailing company Uber, told The Information in April that the company had exhausted its entire 2026 budget for AI coding tools in just four months of the year. This revelation is even more shocking because Uber was actively encouraging the adoption of AI tools. It also set up internal leaderboards to rank teams based on their use of AI tools.

The more emphasis on AI, the higher the cost

According to Mint’s report, this pattern seen between Microsoft and Uber points to a tension that has received little attention in discussions related to workplace AI. The more companies push their employees to use AI, the faster its costs increase.