Claude Code creator says companies are right to focus on AI's ROI — but they still need to allow for experimentation

Anthropic's Boris Cherny says companies should make sure their employees can still experiment with AI

Anthropic

Claude Code creator Boris Cherny has a message for companies that are nervous about their AI token budgets."ROI is absolutely the right framing because you don't want to just think about cost because you kind of spend something on it and you get something back," Cherny said during a recent fireside chat at Scale AI.Jesse Chen, Meta's director of product management who moderated the chat, asked the Anthropic employee directly about the recent concerns raised by Uber COO Andrew Macdonald about whether the rideshare giant's AI spending was leading to enough of a return to justify the rising cost of AI tokens.Tokens are units of text that serve as a measurement for AI usage, such as the prompts processed by large language models, including those that power chatbots like Anthropic's Claude or its generative AI coding tool, Claude Code.Cherny said it's right to be focused on ROI. It's also important, he said, not to overdo it in response to cost concerns."The way to do this is give people tokens and give them safety to experiment so they feel like they can try stuff and they're not going to get penalized for it," he said. "Once you find these internal use cases that kind of work, then you want to control the costs and you want to do that on the backend, not on the front end."Otherwise, companies might miss out on the best ideas for deploying AI.