Meta reportedly halves Claude users to 30,000 as distillation fears grow

Meta’s love affair with Anthropic’s Claude appears to be cooling. The number of Meta staff using Claude reportedly dropped from 60,000 to 30,000. The reported user figures have not been confirmed through direct headcounts. They rest largely on token consumption metrics and spending estimates. What Meta actually changed Starting in late June 2026, Meta put significant restrictions on how employees access and use two rival coding tools: Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex. The rules hit Meta’s applied AI engineers most directly. Those engineers now need to seek approval, or pause certain tasks, when the work involves either of these outside coding assistants. The stated concern is something called model distillation. In AI terms, distillation happens when outputs from one model end up shaping the training of another. If code written with Claude or Codex slips into Meta’s own training data, Meta’s models could absorb traits from its competitors. The token binge that came first The restrictions follow a period of very heavy internal use. Earlier in 2026, Meta employees reportedly burned through 60.2 trillion tokens via Anthropic tools in a single 30-day period. That surge was re...