# I Told Ya Guys. AI? We are too poor to afford it. > Source: > Published: 2026-06-05 14:31:28+00:00 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. Yeah, this is real, and it's as ironic as it sounds. **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. **Why Claude Code is winning inside Microsoft:** **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. **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." **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. This one just went live **today** (June 1, 2026), and developers are absolutely losing it. **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. **The math that broke people:** **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. **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**. **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. **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. **What this means practically:** Here's the uncomfortable truth these two stories reveal together: **Microsoft can't afford its own AI at scale, and neither can its customers.** Microsoft 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. The 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? **The alternatives people are jumping to:** **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. So 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.