By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-08-06 03:36:00
Microsoft spent May telling its Windows, Office and Surface engineers to wind down Claude Code and move to GitHub Copilot CLI before the fiscal year closed on June 30. That looked like a licensing decision, and an expensive one for Anthropic. This week’s internal memo suggests the harder blow was still coming.Jay Parikh, the executive vice president who runs Microsoft’s CoreAI organisation, wrote to his teams that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for,” asked engineers to review their own AI spending, and made OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 the default model for internal use. 404 Media first reported the memo, which lands at a company that has just posted another record quarter and is still worried enough about its own AI bill to put a ceiling on it.
