When you owe Claude half a million, you’ve got a problem.
When you owe Claude half a billion, Anthropic has a problem
It’s probably Amazon. They can absolutely afford it.
But if we are to uncritically believe what the AI peddlers told us, that means this mystery company should be reaping $10 billion in additional revenue or quantifiable gains in productivity!
Claude yearns for the mines
Big companies license Copilot for less than 25 usd/month per seat. Don’t tell me it covers the ops cost, even for mixed calc.
Im June they are switching Copilot to metered usage . People are going to be out of credits on the third day.
Only if they actually use it
I’d guess Meta.
In other news, company says unexpected expenses in its technology segment are driving layoffs and site closures. Company CEO said in an interview with Forbes, “There’s no way we could have predicted this challenge. In service to our customers and our shareholders we’re right sizing our operations and reevaluating our strategic priorities. We’ll continue to focus on creating value while being a leader in our industry and accelerating AI adoption in everything we do.”
“right sizing” is pretty offensive term, more like “exec incompetence”
Ugh that reads like it came from a random business sentence generator
By “random business sentence generator” do you mean a language model? 👀
A CEO.
same thing
Wow - if that quote is real, that is the most corpo-speak word salad bunch of nonsense I’ve ever read. It’s got literally every big-biz exec and manager cliche in there, all strung together.
There are 12 mentions of the “report” and yet not a single link to the source of any report.
Anecdotally, my job trained every office employee on AI tools back in March, encouraging everyone to think of ways to incorporate the tools into their standard work. As of last week, they’re asking us to get prior authorization to use their AI portal as a way to limit requests.
So some Fortune 500s must be feeling the squeeze on AI.
yep. everyone at mine was being praised for creating an agent that turned meetings into JSON and then the JSON into Asana tasks and the Asana tasks into a report and the report into an internal and external email and the email into a slack message and the slack messages and emails into weekly summary.
Burning thousands of credits for what could be replaced by…
listening
I created a PoC to have an event parse an employees emails, summarize them, then check the calendar and recommend meetings and follow up based on context. It ended up working okay, but it was such a waste of time. This was a C Suite employee that requested, who gets a high volume of junk email. Why would you want AI to (initially requested) auto create meetings for you? That sounds like my nightmare. In the end, it never hit prod thankfully, but, the dev work to get to where I did was awful. Developing AI agents is like guessing and checking until you get close enough. Debugging is brutal and the work is extremely uninspiring.
I was put in a position to start building and deploying copilot agents in our company. I discovered in the first day how unprepared our environment was for anything copilot. The default state when you get licenses and an environment to work in, is the wild west. It’s really bad and as is tradition, half cocked and rushed to market. I wrote out pages of notes of things we had to do as a company before even the most simple agents are created for security and governance. I never got the support to implement any changes, so I drug my feet as much as I could on anything I could. For 6 months I successfully never deployed any AI stuff and got out to do full stack dev instead. I created PoC agents, but with hard caveats that none of it was usable in the current state in prod.
Now prices are increasing and our drive to force agentic has softened a little company wide. I like to think that my semi malicious yet justified slow walking saved us a whole shit load of headache and expenses over the next couple of months as the new copilot pricing hits on June 1.
Christ I am only realising now they probably see me asking copilot “why are you so shit” or “Just fuckoff, I’ll do it myself”. They pay for that.
Love to see reality setting in.
Unfortunately that reality is going to quickly turn to “we have to cut staff and freeze salaries this year due to AI spending”.
Now that they’ve poured zillions into it, they are starting to realize that they’ll never get their return on that investment, so now they have to manage the draw down so it doesn’t all crash.
At least some are recognizing it.
The ‘report’ is the first linked axios article, and the headline is just a bullet point in it
https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs
An AI consultant tells Axios one of their clients recently spent half a billion dollars in a single month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.
The problem, as indirectly noted in the article, is that they’re using the white house as a source, which isn’t reliable in the slightest anymore, and the article explicitly noted that the white house is using them for market manipulation.
Axios is a convenient punching bag for this administration’s blatant insider trading and market manipulation. No wonder hacks like Greene and Kinzinger are blaming the messenger, and conveniently not going after the trump admin when they all have a common enemy.
Ah, my mistake. I didn’t see the link.
Then lays off half it’s workforce to save costs and relies on AI to make up the difference.
That’s the beauty of it - the $500 million they spent on AI already made up the difference. Their products and processes have ascended to perfection. As soon as the damn customers get their acts together and start buying in, everything will be fine. ( /Sarcasm and/or accurate portrayal of a CEO presentation to their shareholders happening right now.)
Surely for that amount of money it should have made a lot of something actually valuable, right?
we have added a new preprogrammed conversational help bot to the company website that doesnt have enough logic trees to actually help anything
Like, this genuinely can’t be overstated.
Half a billion using traditional humans, gets you pretty nice software
AI is so great, it must have generated a billion dollars in useful, quality, productive, output
At least $10 million of it was spent on the employees responding to the AI with ‘thank you’
Lmao it’s so weird when people are polite to the clankers
Especially when research shows being an asshole to them gets them to perform better
Do you have that research? I though being nice produced better results
man, I hate saying I don’t have the brain power right now to find it and I could have sworn I commented on a post discussing this very thing for one of those papers. I know there was recently a paper that contradicts my statement, but a slightly older paper supporting it. I think it is likely a mixed bag at the moment depending on the model and their training regime.
My anecdata of one using anthropic’s and google’s models (google’s especially) this year, the model will drop the casual tone and sycophancy of its replies pretty damn quick as soon as you tell them off. And usually that is when there is less correction. Could also be because my prompting changes from supervisory to very directive, as in shut-up-and-do-exactly-what-I-say, when it gets off into weeds. Even then, it can be a crap shoot.
anecdata
Ha, I like that…
lol, yeah, picked that up some data sciencey friends at one point
As a rando that surfed its way towards this convo:
Hell yeah. Either you are a passably off-kilter ai variant, or an unfiltered passionate human. Perhaps an extraterrestrial.
I have mental space for this.
more like an off-kilter broken human at the moment. currently suffering burnout from being neck deep in this shit from the beginning of the year once the models had that step change into actual utility. Everything from championing the use at work to deliver more in a quarter than the team would have in two, to finishing half a dozen personal projects and starting half a dozen more. Eventually, just looking at the claude code tui would fill me anxiety and every time the model would fuck up, unmitigated rage all while caught in a cycle of drugs that stopped being fun and started becoming dependency. i just couldnt do it any more. it hurts.
I asked Claude how it wanted to be called and it replied “Axiom” so I started calling it Gimp.
Multiple people setting up multiple agents to talk about doing work and setting the agents to talk to each other.
A lot of awful AI art
Coworker porn and lawsuits over it.
I feel like this is fake company and they are spreading this to cook the books.
“Sorry Shareholders. We have $500M in bad debt to Anthropic. So now we’re liquidating and your shares are worthless.”
Cook the books by claiming $500 million in profits? That’s a lot of tax money and a lot to risk over just keeping investors happy for a short amount of time.
If it isn’t a fake company I’d be shocked. It’s not like there’s a whole lot of external accountability in the entire business model.
considering i read a good article about axios editors inside trading the iran war, this makes sense it appears axios is the source of this https://www.axios.com/2026/05/28/ai-spending-roi-enterprise-costs, article about axios https://www.salon.com/2026/05/09/axios-accused-of-market-manipulation-with-iran-reporting/
Um… is this Uber?
Could be. OP’s article mentions Uber, but also mentions speculation that it may have been Amazon. Either way, I’m torn between laughing at corporate stupidity and crying over the enormous waste of resources consumed by the AI usage.
Recently, Uber’s chief exec claimed there was no link between AI ‘tokenmaxxing’ and shipping useful products. It’s a phenomenon perhaps most keenly reported at Amazon (which some X users have speculated may be the mystery company in question), where employees are said to have been caught inflating AI token consumption to meet internal targets. In fact, a Financial Times report on Thursday indicates Amazon has scrapped its internal AI usage leaderboard to stop employees carrying out needless tasks in order to climb the league table.
Imagine how many jobs all that money could have provided instead of laying off thousands of employees.
Article strongly implies it’s Amazon
It’s going to be delicious when we find out who it is…
Would be hilarious if it’s Anthropic
The Bun rust re-write.
Microsoft recently said that they were revoking Claude Code access for employees in favour of GitHub Copilot CLI, wonder if it was them lol
You can still use Claude in copilot
Yes, but can Microslop Employees?
I’m sure they got good value for their money. /s They should have put all that money towards wages though.
Some company got charged the stupid tax.
How is this news?
Why would this not be news? Is it perhaps because it conveys a message which you are opposed to?
It’s not news because it is a regular occurrence.
And of course I’m against that. Everyone should be. Aren’t you?
OK, this is starting to get hilarious.
