Microsoft report shows AI costs more than human workers

Companies are aggressively pushing employees to adopt AI tools, believing they unlock productivity gains. But the pressure to use artificial intelligence is creating fractures, and some of those fractures may be permanent.

Microsoft has reportedly started canceling most of its direct Claude Code licenses, according to The Verge, shifting engineers toward GitHub Copilot CLI instead. This reversal comes just six months after Microsoft first opened access to Claude Code, encouraging thousands of developers, project managers, designers, and other staff to experiment with coding. The technology gained traction quickly, perhaps too quickly. The sheer scale of employee usage is now forcing the company to backtrack on a tool its own engineers had grown to depend on. Canceling Claude Code licenses does not affect Microsoft’s Foundry deal, which includes investing up to $5 billion in Anthropic and giving Foundry customers access to Claude models, along with Anthropic’s $30 billion commitment to buy Azure compute capacity, according to The Verge.

Microsoft is not alone in scaling back internal AI use. Uber’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information in April that the company had already exhausted its entire 2026 AI coding tools budget in just four months. This follows a period where Uber actively encouraged adoption through internal leaderboards ranking teams by AI tool usage.

These reports may dampen the enthusiasm behind the massive bets tech giants have placed on AI. While some executives cling to visions of an AI “renaissance” or “revolution,” the cost of adoption is proving a stubborn bottleneck. The developments also suggest that the economics of replacing or augmenting human labor with AI may be more complex than early forecasts implied. That echoes what Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, recently said in an interview with Axios.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees,” he said.

Anthropic did not immediately respond to Fortune’s request for comment. Microsoft declined to provide a comment.

An emerging AI paradox: cheaper tokens, bigger bills

Uber and Microsoft are not the only firms pushing employees to maximize AI usage. Like at Uber, a Meta employee created a leaderboard called “Claudeonomics,” named after Anthropic’s AI model, to track which workers use the most AI. Amazon is urging its employees to “toxenmaxx,” or use as many AI tokens as possible, tokens being the basic building blocks of AI compute.

But with a token-based pricing system, the work becomes more expensive with increased usage and better efficiency. Goldman Sachs recently forecast that agentic AI could drive a 24-fold increase in token consumption by 2030 as consumers and enterprises adopt AI agents, reaching an astonishing 120 quadrillion tokens per month. As businesses turn to AI agents to boost productivity, aggregate costs could rise sharply even if the price of each token falls.

However, as consumption grows, the cost of individual AI tokens is expected to drop dramatically. A recent report from research firm Gartner found that by 2030, inference on a one-trillion-parameter LLM,a highly sophisticated AI model,will cost AI firms nearly 90% less than it did in 2025. Even so, Gartner predicted that cheaper tokens will not translate to cheaper enterprise AI because agentic models require far more tokens per task than standard models, increased consumption can outpace falling unit costs, and AI providers will not fully pass through lower costs to consumers. As a result, inference costs are likely to rise.

“Chief Product Officers (CPOs) should not confuse the deflation of commodity tokens with the democratization of frontier reasoning,” Gartner senior director analyst Will Sommer warned in a statement.

That reality may complicate the grand plans some firms have for deploying AI agents. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang recently said he believes 100 AI agents will one day work alongside every employee at his company.

Huang is part of a broader wave of CEOs touting an agentic future in which digital workers operate across the enterprise. But if token consumption rises faster than unit costs fall, that future could come with a much heavier bill than executives anticipate.