After telling employees to stop using Claude Code, Microsoft’s internal memo has more ‘bad news’ for Anthropic

Microsoft spent May telling its Windows, Office and Surface engineers to wind down Claude Code and move to GitHub Copilot CLI before the fiscal year closed on June 30. That looked like a licensing decision, and an expensive one for Anthropic. This week’s internal memo suggests the harder blow was still coming.

Jay Parikh, the executive vice president who runs Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, wrote to his teams that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for,” asked engineers to review their own AI spending, and made OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 the default model for internal use.