Technology

It brings me joy to know that corporations are trusting other corporations to not rip each other off. Wage theft is more lucrative than whatever product or service being sold. As if AI companies exists to help anyone other than themselves . The only way this works is if the largest paying companies work out some kind of kick back, pyramid, price fixing scheme. I really appreciate Claude for how it's assisted me in fixing things but I know that someday AI will exist solely for the rich.

If AI makes you twice as productive, and there's fewer taxes on spending money for tokens than there is for spending money on salaries, the rational amount for a corporation to spend on it is more than a human's entire salary, per person working with it.

Naively assuming corporations approximate rational actors, and AI does measurably improve productivity, this implies a gain of roughly 2% if these employees are earning federal minimum wage, or well below 1% if they earn average software developer wages.

Maybe their contract deliverables are poorly suited to this use case or something, but if they are given a fixed amount of money to produce some software item, then it makes sense to prioritize productivity per dollar.

“You must use AI!”

“No, no, no, no….not like that!”

Just trying to shoehorn profit into a system that was never going to deliver one in the first place.

Why even bother at all? What can you do with those tokens? Ask for the weather twice?

Alternate headline: C-Suite Execs Come To The Realization That AI Costs Money

If you're spending $1K per month on LLMs -- putting aside whether this is productive or ethical for a moment -- wouldn't it make more sense to just pony up the $5K-$10K or so that it would cost to provision a private, local model? Might that not actually be superior in terms of corporate security?

The $29 figure is doing a lot of quiet work in this story, because that's exactly what a Pro plan costs. So the real message isn't really a budget cap, it's 'stop expensing API tokens and expense a subscription instead'. I'd bet a chunk of that $1,000 spend was people wiring API access into internal tooling and prototypes, which feels productive right up until finance sees the invoice and has no idea what any of it maps to. The part that'll actually sting is that this is how a lot of shadow automation dies: not because it didn't work, but because nobody could explain the line item. At least a hard cap forces the conversation that should've happened months earlier.

I didn't realize the business plans were token metered differently from the Pro plan I've been on for a while. $20/month, and it has session/weekly limits, but I rarely hit them, and I use it, a lot.

I do wonder if this will encourage businesses to branch out into running local models for simpler tasks.

The title is misleading. They didn't cap it, they just declared that if you are spending more than that, you have to be able to explain what you're spending it on and why, giving it a business reason and a project to associate the costs to, which I expect almost all Claude users at Accenture probably can. This is simply an accounting change, not a company-wide shutdown of Claude.

Heavy use remains possible, but it now needs a budget owner.

Wait what? How? But wasn't AI the thing to make business save tons of money by replacing workers with an almost free "artificial worker"??

Are you telling me that, as everyone and their mothers were saying, this was just a lie? Who could've thought?!

I have a friend that works there. They told me about this, and I was like "per day?"

I was not prepared to learn that the budget was less than a dollar per day. Might as well just stop using AI agents that that point.