(Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images)
An unnamed company accidentally blew $500,000,000 on Anthropic’s Claude AI in just one month after failing to set spending caps for its employees, according to multiple reports.
The consultant hired by the mystery company attributed the jaw-dropping tab to the unrestricted access granted to all employees, which quickly spiraled out of control and racked up half a billion dollars in charges, according to Axios.
The Pentagon is notably targeting Anthropic as a “supply chain risk,” allegedly for insisting on safeguards to prohibit its AI from being used for mass surveillance. As a result, President Donald Trump ordered the government to “immediately cease” using the AI mode, prompting Anthropic to sue the administration.
Still, while some companies rushed to embrace artificial intelligence in the workforce, others are taking a more cost-effective approach.
Microsoft reportedly reduced internal usage of Claude after code licenses jumped from $500 to $2,000 a month per engineer. Uber also faced a brutal reality check after the company reportedly blew through its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Uber’s COO, Andrew MacDonald, noted that the cost was becoming difficult to justify, saying “that link is not there yet.”
“If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how [many] useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify,” Macdonald said in a recent interview.
NEW YORK, NEW YORK – FEBRUARY 16: In this illustration, the Claude AI website is seen on a laptop on February 16, 2026 in New York City. According to reports from the Wall Street Journal, the Defense Department used Anthropic’s Claude AI, via its Palantir contract, to help with the attack on Venezuela and capture former President Nicolás Maduro. (Photo illustration by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
This comes as Anthropic’s valuation surges to a whopping $965 billion after raising another $65 billion in private funding. At just five years old, this makes Claude one of the most valuable startups in the world.
It’s not just Claude that has skyrocketed in value. Anthropic’s rival OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT, reportedly is making $47 billion in annualized revenue by selling its chatbot to people and companies.