Accenture, the consultancy that has spent 3 years telling clients to put AI at the centre of everything, has told its own staff they can spend $29 a month on Claude. 404 Media reported it this week. The cap took effect on 1 October, usage is now charged by consumption, and anyone who goes over has to find a project or team willing to pick up the rest of the bill. Some employees had been running up $500 to $1,000 a month. One said their access was cut off entirely.
In sterling that is about £22, which is roughly what a decent Manchester lunch costs for two.
It is not just Accenture. Earlier this month The Information reported that Meta and Microsoft are steering staff away from Claude too. Meta’s Claude Code users have fallen from around 60,000 to 30,000, partly through layoffs, after the company spent more than $105m on the tool in a single 28-day stretch. Microsoft has cut the amount an individual can consume from as much as $100,000 a month to about $10,000 and trimmed its projected Anthropic spend by more than a third.
Before anyone enjoys the irony too much, it is worth saying what is actually going on, because it is about to happen in every agency in the country.
The leaderboard
The detail I can’t get past is from Meta. Staff built an internal leaderboard, reportedly named Claudeonomics, to compete on how much AI they were using. The report calls it “tokenmaxxing”. People were racing each other to consume the most.
That is what happens when you tell a workforce that the future belongs to whoever adopts fastest and then don’t tell them what adoption is for. Usage becomes the metric because it is the only one that exists. Finance sees a bill with no output attached to it, and finance does what finance does.
I have sat in that meeting. It is not an unreasonable meeting. Someone is looking at a number that doubled in a quarter and asking what it bought, and the honest answer is that nobody set it up so that question could be answered.
So the cap is not stupid. The cap is the predictable result of launching a tool with no definition of what good looks like. The mistake was made 6 months before the cap, when nobody wrote down which jobs the tool was supposed to change. It is the same failure as the AI pilot that never lands, seen from the finance side.
What a $29 cap actually does
Think about who it lands on. The person spending $800 a month on Claude is, in most organisations, one of two things. Either they have found something that genuinely works and are running it hard, or they are mucking about. A flat cap can’t tell the difference. It stops both, and it stops the first one harder because they had further to fall.
The people spending $29 are not the ones you need to study. The ones at $800 are, and the right response to that bill is to go and sit with them for an afternoon and find out what they are doing. If it is real, you have found a process worth rolling out and the $800 was the cheapest research you will ever buy. If it is not, you have a conversation to have, and it is a conversation about judgement, not a line in a budget.
Instead the person at $800 now has to go and ask a project lead to fund them. Some will. Most will quietly go back to doing it the old way, because asking is embarrassing and the old way still works, and nobody will ever know what was lost.
The agency version
We are at the stage where most agencies have handed out licences and are starting to get the bill. The bill is lumpy and it does not match headcount, because a handful of people use the tools properly and everyone else opens them twice a week. That lumpiness looks like a problem to a finance director and like a signal to anyone running the adoption.
If you cap it before you have looked at it, you pay twice. Once for the licences nobody uses, and once for the person who was getting somewhere and went back to the slow way because the fast one needed a form.