One Company Burned $500 Million on Claude in a Single Month, So Walmart Started Rationing the Robot

The whole business runs on a hook: vendors charge chatbot users way less than the bot costs to serve, the idea being customers get hooked on the business value, then Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI move them off monthly subscriptions onto token billing where the cost of anything is completely obscure. The obscurity has a number now: one source told Axios a client had spent $500 million in a month on Claude Code, with the best guesses being Amazon or Uber. Reality arrived for everyone else, because Amazon, Walmart, Cisco, Uber and Meta have introduced spending caps, discouraged wasteful use, or pushed workers toward cheaper models to control rising AI costs. Walmart spent a year shoving Code Puppy at staff and now hands them a token allowance, which is the executive class discovering that the all-you-can-eat buffet they built has a kitchen. Pivot to AI on runaway AI bills