MICROSOFT FIRES ANTHROPIC AND SENDS THOUSANDS OF ENGINEERS BACK TO COPILOT BEFORE JUNE ENDS Microsoft invited thousands of engineers, program managers and designers across its Experiences and Devices division to use Anthropic’s Claude Code starting in December 2025. Six months later the experiment is over, and it ended exactly the way you would expect: too popular, too expensive, fiscal year deadline bearing down. The company is canceling most internal Claude Code licenses effective June 30, the last day of Microsoft’s fiscal year. Engineers working on Windows, Teams, Outlook, Microsoft 365 and Surface have been directed by Executive Vice President Rajesh Jha to transition their workflows to GitHub Copilot CLI instead. The problem was never that Claude Code failed. The problem is that it worked so well developers quietly moved their daily coding habits away from Copilot and toward Anthropic’s tool. Microsoft sells Copilot to enterprises around the world. Having its own engineers defect in the middle of that sales pitch is an embarrassment the company can no longer afford. Uber is in a similar position, having burned through its entire 2026 AI tools budget in four months by letting teams run loose with Claude Code and Cursor simultaneously. The bill got paid. The budget did not survive. Both stories point to the same uncomfortable reality: AI coding tools are so good that companies are blowing past their spending limits before the fiscal year ends. Keywords: Microsoft Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, enterprise AI tools, Anthropic