Meta & Microsoft's Claude Slowdown, His Agent Leaked His Banking Info, Don’t Bully Your AI

Alex Kantrowitz (0:00)

Microsoft and Meta back away from Claude does it spell some trouble for Anthropic ahead of its IPO. Will your AI agent share your banking data in a group chat? And finally, don't be mean to your AI, you might end up getting banned from the service. That's coming up on a Big Technology Podcast Friday edition right after this. This episode is brought to you by Genesis. What does it actually take to put a Gentic AI to work across an entire enterprise? I recently spoke with Genesis chairman and CEO Tony Bates about why orchestration is emerging as a competitive advantage in customer experience and what companies need to get right in the AI era. Then I sat down with Adam Mitchell, head of enterprise business solutions at Voia Financial to go inside a large scale Gentic CX transformation including the business decisions, trade-offs and lessons along the way. You can watch both conversations now on my YouTube channel today.

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Welcome to Big Technology Podcast Friday Edition, where we break down the news in our traditional cool headed and nuanced format. We have a great show for you today. There's new reporting that shows Meta and Microsoft might be backing away from spending on Claude just as Anthropic gets ready for its IPO.

Your personal agents might be very useful, but it might share your banking data in a group chat. We'll talk about what happened and why you should or shouldn't be concerned. Then finally, Anthropic has a new policy that if you're persistently mean to Claude, it might ban you from the service. So we'll talk about whether you should be mean to your AI or not and what the consequences might be. Joining us as always on Friday is Ranjan Roy of Margins. Ranjan, welcome. Good to see you.

Ranjan Roy (2:01)

Good to see you. Don't be mean to your AI. Don't bully Claude.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:05)

Are you mean to your AI? Do you ever bully? Because sometimes people say if you're a little bit mean, you get better results.

Ranjan Roy (2:11)

I think I bully Copilot just because I think Copilot likes to be bullied. Copilot likes to be bullied, but maybe Claude's a little more sensitive.

We're starting right there.

Alex Kantrowitz (2:25)

We're starting fast. All right, we'll get to that in a bit, but we should really talk about the main story this week.

And look, it's not a crazy headline, but I think it says a lot about the risks of this AI buildout and what is going to happen now that standard models are performing pretty well. So, a headline from the information this week said that Microsoft and Meta are both reevaluating their spend with Claude and pulling back in their own interesting ways. So I'll just read a little bit from the story. Meta platforms and Microsoft, two of Anthropic's biggest corporate customers, are working to cut their employees' use of Claude, a challenge to the AI firm's efforts to sustain its explosive growth. Microsoft executives earlier this year projected that the company was on track to spend at least $1 billion on its own internal use of Anthropic's technology. Microsoft has since lowered that figure by more than a third after it asked its staff to use less Claude to save on cost and spend more time using Microsoft's homegrown AI tools. At Meta, the number of employees using Anthropic's coding assistant Claude Code has dropped sharply to about 30,000 recently. That's down from about 60,000 users earlier this year. You know, I said it was a small headline, but actually I'm not going to overreact here because it's a small headline, but it's big news and I don't think it is an overreaction to say that this is some troubling news for Anthropic. Not the end of the world, but remember, this is a company that's heavily dependent on a few customers. You know, there's two customers that we know from the company's S1 that make up 25% of its revenue.

It's safe to say that one or both of these could be included in that group. And if companies find that lesser tools are doing as good of a job as Claude Code, it is a threat to Anthropic's long-term ability to grow. So I wanted to start there. Ranjan, what do you think about this news? Is it doom time for Anthropic or is this just a hiccup?