Last week a company nobody can name spent $500 million in a single month on Anthropic's Claude API. Not $500K. Not $5M. Half a billion dollars. In one month. Because nobody set a spending limit.
Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April. Four months into the year, done.
Microsoft quietly cancelled its internal Claude Code licenses and told engineers to go back to GitHub Copilot.
All three stories broke within days of each other, and they all point to the same thing. Token-based billing, when given to an ungoverned team, is a financial weapon pointed at your own company. Every prompt, every context window, every agentic loop gets billed. An engineer running Claude Code seriously can rack up $500 to $2,000 a month just by doing their job well.
The answer is not stricter policies. The answer is owning the infrastructure and making tokens free.
