I can give you some additional anecdotal evidence to support your comment.

I work at a Fortune 200 company. At first, it was the Wild West. Need an LLM? You got it. Need to or want to build an army of agents? Done and done. We literally had everything at the tips of fingers for about 3 months. Teams were building their own internal tools, the team I work on canceled contracts with several software vendors because teams were building the same tools for what they thought was nothing.

Then they signed contracts with Anthropic and Google because I would assume they saw the token usage was through the roof. One month later? They completely cut off access to everybody for both Claude and Gemini. If you wanted access? Suddenly it was several forms, along with several approvals and a rock solid business case why you needed it. And before you got to the forms? You were added to a waiting list that was thousands of people long.

The entire company is now in damage control after trying to get the genie back in the bottle. I'm guessing someone saw how much we would be paying for the tokens we'd been using and decided to shut the party down so to speak.

You like to believe that these companies know what they're doing, they do not, I mean don't even try to find the logic behind their actions. They just follow the shiny things and then when it doesn't work, react by screwing up their employees. Their decisions age like milk on the countertop. After I got laid off a few month ago, I can't imagine myself working another 9 to 5. Because above all, it's an incredibly stupid way to spend your fleeting time here.

Most companies these days are incredibly disciplined on spending. That’s one reason why corporations have record profits in the last few years. The level of efficiency is so high.

That’s what makes the AI Wild West so fascinating to me. Companies just threw money at it out of fear of falling behind.

Now, I think that fear has subsided at many companies.

I always thought it was incredibly questionable that we were able to slurp down AI tooling with no questions asked. Meanwhile, if we want a piece of software for some other non-AI purpose, the prospect of spending $50/month per employee is met with deep scrutiny or outright denial by default.

Maybe it was your company with the 500 million Claude bill.

Probably a stupid question, but isn't giving developers $200 for a Max x20 subscription cheaper than using the API? I was discussing Claude's monthly bills with some friends recently. Most of us are in the $700-$1000 range, and I don't feel like I really spend that much. I have a Max x20 personal account, and I do a ton of work for my side projects through it.

Were there any managers fired for incompetence?

Was there at least performance gains to be measured?

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