An unnamed company allegedly blew half a billion dollars on Claude licenses in a single month because nobody set usage limits. Cases like this show that without real AI expertise in model selection and context engineering, productivity promises just turn into runaway costs.

AI costs are rising faster than returns, pushing Big Tech, startups and model providers to cut spending and raising new risks for margins, revenue and valuations.

Microsoft and Uber are reportedly scaling back their usage of Anthropic's Claude Code tool after the costs became too high.