In December of last year, Microsoft told thousands of its engineers, product managers and designers that they could use Claude Code, Anthropic’s command-line coding agent, on the company dime.
By spring, the tool had spread well beyond engineering: into the kind of non-technical roles that, in earlier waves of enterprise software, would have waited years for a seat. Inside Microsoft, the rollout was framed as a learning exercise. Outside it, the surface signal was simpler.
The world’s largest software company, the one with its own foundation models and its own coding assistant, had just paid a competitor to put a rival product in front of its workforce.
Six months later, that experiment is being wound down. According to reporting in Windows Central and other outlets following The Verge’s original scoop, Microsoft is cancelling most direct Claude Code licences inside its Experiences and Devices group, the division that builds Windows, Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams and Surface.
Affected engineers have been told to migrate to GitHub Copilot CLI by 30 June, the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year. The official reason is toolchain unification. The unofficial reason is in the calendar.The 💜 of EU techThe latest rumblings from the EU tech scene, a story from our wise ol' founder Boris, and some questionable AI art. It's free, every week, in your inbox. Sign up now!
