AI cost explosion backfires enterprise: Microsoft cuts Claude authorization, rumored to burn $500 million in a single month According to BlockBeats, on May 29th, as enterprises deploy AI on a large scale, more and more companies are questioning whether high AI spending truly brings returns. According to reports, Microsoft has cancelled most of its Claude Code licenses, partly due to high costs; Uber's COO has also publicly stated that AI spending is becoming "increasingly difficult to rationalize". More concerning is that an AI consultant revealed to Axios that one of its clients spent up to $500 million in a single month for not restricting employees from using Claude. Industry insiders point out that many companies have previously fallen into the so-called "tokenmaxxing" - crazily consuming AI tokens and pursuing full AI adoption, but the actual ROI is not ideal. Micro1 CEO Ali Ansari stated that the current large-scale commercial scenarios where AI is truly mature are mainly programming, but many companies blindly apply AI to the entire organization, leading to a surge in IT costs. The report also mentioned that some enterprise employees may even use high cost AI models to query simple questions such as weather, and enterprise level AI services are not truly "unlimited use", with a large number of simple requests quickly pushing up token costs. At the same time, more and more companies are starting to hedge the pressure of AI spending by laying off employees. CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur stated that the real reason for some companies to lay off employees may simply be that 'this is the only way to cover AI bills'.