The AI ​​cost crisis is hitting tech giants as employee “tokenmaxxing” backfires and triggers a corporate retreat at Microsoft, Meta and Amazon – agentic AI eats up to 1000 times more tokens than standard AI

Many tech companies are pushing their employees to use AI tools and increase their productivity, but it seems that this initiative is backfiring. Accordingly The edge, Microsoft has reportedly pushed its employees to switch to its own Copilot CLI instead of Claude Code because the company wants to use an internal tool instead of a third-party one. However, according to sources, the main reason is that the cost of using Claude Code has been steadily increasing as more and more people use the AI ​​tool.

Microsoft is not alone in this Assets reports that other companies are also reducing the use of AI. While it is true that the cost of training AI models is decreasing, making AI tokens more affordable, people have started using more tokens for their daily tasks. This is especially true for agent AI, which can use thousands of times more tokens compared to querying an LLM, depending on the number of steps required to execute your instructions. For example, OpenClaw inventor Peter…