A firm spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic’s Claude AI because it failed to set usage limits in what may rank as one of the costliest bills in the space. Thousands of employees at the firm ran complex tasks on Claude and the meter kept running nonstop, an IT consultant told Axios.
In another instance, Microsoft reportedly cancelled Claude Code licences due to growing token bills. Uber said it exhausted its 2026 AI budget in just four months. Companies are drowning in token bills due to heavy spending on AI tools without clear returns, success metrics, or guardrails.
