{"slug": "i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it", "title": "I Told Ya Guys. AI? We are too poor to afford it.", "summary": "Microsoft is spending nearly $500 million annually on Anthropic's Claude Code, rolling it out across engineering, product, and design teams as a coordinated internal pilot program, even as the company owns GitHub and markets its own Copilot as the industry standard. On the same day, GitHub Copilot switched to a token-based billing system with \"GitHub AI Credits\" at $0.01 each, removing the fallback to cheaper models when credits run out, after internal documents revealed the week-over-week cost of running Copilot nearly doubled since January 2026. The two developments together signal that even Microsoft cannot sustain the compute costs of its own AI at scale, forcing both the company and its customers into a more expensive, credit-constrained reality.", "body_md": "Alright, let's unpack this — both stories are wild in different ways, and together they paint a pretty damning picture of where AI tooling is headed in mid-2026.\n\nYeah, this is real, and it's as ironic as it sounds.\n\n**What's happening:** Microsoft — the company that owns GitHub, invested ~$13 billion in OpenAI, and markets GitHub Copilot as the industry standard — is actively rolling out **Anthropic's Claude Code** internally. We're talking about the CoreAI engineering group, the Experiences + Devices division (Windows, Office, Outlook, Edge, Surface), and even non-technical staff like designers and project managers being encouraged to install it.\n\n**Why Claude Code is winning inside Microsoft:**\n\n**The scale of it:** According to reports, Microsoft is spending close to **$500 million annually** on Anthropic products, making them one of Anthropic's top customers. This isn't a rogue engineer thing — it's a coordinated pilot program.\n\n**Microsoft's official line:** Communications chief Frank Shaw said, *\"OpenAI continues to be our primary partner and model provider. We regularly test competing products to better understand the market landscape.\"* Which is corporate speak for \"yes, we're using the competitor's tool because it's better for the job.\"\n\n**The deeper signal:** Even the creator of Copilot recognizes that a single AI model monopoly doesn't work. Different tasks need different \"brains.\" The fact that Microsoft is running what amounts to a **\"coding referendum\"** between Copilot and Claude Code internally tells you everything about their confidence level in their own product's supremacy.\n\nThis one just went live **today** (June 1, 2026), and developers are absolutely losing it.\n\n**What changed:** GitHub Copilot switched from a flat \"premium request\" model to **token-based billing using \"GitHub AI Credits\"** (1 credit = $0.01). Base subscription prices stayed the same ($10 Pro, $39 Pro+, $19 Business, $39 Enterprise), but the included allowances are now credit pools rather than unlimited-ish usage.\n\n**The math that broke people:**\n\n**The kicker:** Under the old system, if you exhausted your premium requests, Copilot would fall back to a cheaper model and let you keep working. **That fallback is gone.** When your credits hit zero, premium features just stop until next billing cycle or until you buy more.\n\n**Why GitHub says they did it:** In their own words, *\"Copilot is not the same product it was a year ago\"* — it's now an agentic platform running long, multi-step sessions that cost significantly more compute. They also admitted in internal docs (leaked by Ed Zitron) that the week-over-week cost of running Copilot had **nearly doubled since January 2026**.\n\n**The community response:** The official GitHub community FAQ thread had **904 downvotes and 22 upvotes** as of this morning — one of the most lopsided reactions in GitHub forum history.\n\n**Annual plan holders getting squeezed too:** If you're locked into an annual plan, you're still on the old PRU system — but model multipliers just got jacked up. Claude Opus 4.7 went from a 7.5x multiplier to **27x**. GPT-5.4 went from 1x to **6x**. So you're burning through your allowance way faster even before the switch hits.\n\n**What this means practically:**\n\nHere's the uncomfortable truth these two stories reveal together:\n\n**Microsoft can't afford its own AI at scale, and neither can its customers.**\n\nMicrosoft is paying Anthropic ~$500M/year because Claude Code performs better for their internal engineering needs. Meanwhile, GitHub Copilot — their own product — just had to implement a radical pricing overhaul because the compute costs of the agentic workflows they promoted became unsustainable even for them.\n\nThe leaked internal docs said Copilot's week-over-week costs **nearly doubled in 5 months**. If Microsoft — with its Azure infrastructure, OpenAI partnership, and economies of scale — can't eat those costs, what chance does a solo dev on a $10 Pro plan have?\n\n**The alternatives people are jumping to:**\n\n**The broader trend:** Satya Nadella said on Microsoft's latest earnings call that any per-user business at Microsoft — productivity, coding, security — is becoming a **\"per-user and usage business.\"** This isn't just GitHub. Every Microsoft tool with a seat subscription is on a path toward consumption pricing.\n\nSo yeah — the company that built Copilot uses Claude. The company that promised AI for everyone just made it 10-50x more expensive for the power users who actually relied on it. And the \"free\" tier is basically a demo now. Welcome to AI in 2026.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it", "canonical_source": "https://dev.to/ryo_suwito/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it-4mch", "published_at": "2026-06-05 14:31:28+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-05 14:42:12.719658+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "large-language-models", "ai-products", "ai-infrastructure", "generative-ai"], "entities": ["Microsoft", "GitHub", "OpenAI", "Anthropic", "Claude Code", "GitHub Copilot", "Frank Shaw", "CoreAI"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/i-told-ya-guys-ai-we-are-too-poor-to-afford-it.jsonld"}}