A company would have spent around US$500 million in just one month using Claude, Anthropic’s artificial intelligence model, according to an AI consultant’s report to the website Axios.
The episode, which has not yet been publicly identified, became a symbol of a new phase in the market: that of a spending shock in a sector that, until now, had been adopted almost without brakes.
According to the consultant, the client did not establish any limits on the use of Claude’s licenses by employees. In practice, this freed the team to activate the model en masse, including for trivial tasks that could easily be performed by humans, such as checking the weather forecast, according to a CTO interviewed by Axios.
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The case went viral on social media, with users mocking the amount. “Five private jets. Two yachts. An entire island. All vaporized into tokens,” one wrote. Another commented: “I wanted to be at the meeting with the guy who let Claude’s account reach half a billion dollars in one month. What do you do? Fire him on the spot?”
Pressure to cut costs
Although extreme, the episode illustrates a broader movement: companies that embraced generative AI are now beginning to review the pace and form of use, as the account becomes more visible — and does not always appear correlated with increased productivity or profit.
A Axios cites cases of large companies that are reducing or redirecting spending on AI. Microsoft would be replacing Claude Code licenses with alternatives such as the company’s own GitHub Copilot CLI, in search of more cost efficiency.
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Uber would have already exceeded the entire 2026 budget for Claude Code in April, which led executive Andrew Macdonald to say that “the connection is not there” between the increased use of AI and the return for the customer.
In addition to the direct cost, companies that aggressively encouraged the use of AI are now pulling back.
Amazon, for example, is closing an internal “scoreboard” created by employees to measure who most consumed AI tokens. According to sources heard by Financial Timesthere was an implicit pressure for employees to use the tools more and more, even though the real gain was not clear.
In a recent message to employees, Amazon senior vice president Dave Treadwell called for AI not to be used “just for the sake of it.” “Use AI to solve customer problems, business problems, to innovate,” he said.
