After ‘ban’ on Claude Code, Microsoft has more ‘bad news’ for Anthropic

Microsoft has told engineers that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for” in a new internal memo from EVP Jay Parikh. The memo makes OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 the default internal model, replacing an auto-router that had been sending GitHub Copilot workloads to Anthropic’s Claude. Every Microsoft division now carries an AI token budget target, months after Claude Code licences were cancelled.