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- Anthropic officials are cautioning companies against knee-jerk reactions to rein in AI use.
- Angela Jiang, head of product for the Claude Platform, said some customers are making those sorts of moves.
- The initial tokenmaxxing hype has morphed into a more ROI-focused moment.
Top Anthropic officials are cautioning against companies cutting back on their AI use as costs increase.
"Something that's really top of mind for us that we kind of try to spend some time with users on is what you don't want to do is stop AI usage. That's kind of the wrong move," Angela Jiang, head of product for the Claude Platform, recently told Sequoia Capital's "Training Data" podcast. "And we do actually see some of our customers do that."
Katelyn Lesse, head of platform engineering at Anthropic, said the focus on costs was part of "a normal natural cycle for companies" as they figure out the best way to deploy AI.
"The thing that gets dangerous is when you're kind of just like, here's a cap and you're stuck within your cap," said Lesse, who joined Jiang for the interview.
Jiang said that Anthropic often finds that AI spending has "erupted" in companies where employees procure Anthropic's AI models themselves through "some kind of shadow IT." Instead of curtailing usage, she said companies can find ways to use AI more efficiently.
"What we try to kind of encourage our customers is like, you don't want to stop the innovation," she said. "If you are getting returns on top of this, you are shipping faster than ever before, you can run more operationally efficient — then those are gains."
Lesse said it's about "encouraging innovation" while understanding the different ways to get the desired result.
"One is like you take Opus and you run it all night and you do something crazy," she said. "And another is maybe to get a little bit smarter with the strategies that you put together in order to create that same outcome within a lower cost. And I think that's the next layer of thinking that everyone's going to start to do."
AI companies are facing an increasingly skeptical Corporate America that sees rising AI bills without what some executives have said is an adequate ROI to justify the spending. In response, AI companies like Anthropic have emphasized the cost efficiency of their models and services, which can better tailor AI to specific enterprise needs.
Cost concerns could weigh on the broader AI market as companies like Anthropic approach highly anticipated IPOs.
A new kind of router.
Companies like Vercel are seizing this cost-conscious moment by offering customers a way to route their AI usage to the best model suited for the task. Analysts have said that routing requests will remain in high demand so long as AI token costs remain high.
Jiang said a router "within the Claude space" makes sense to Anthropic.
"I think the bit that we do feel really strongly about on the model routing front is like we are designing our platform for Claude, and we want to make sure that Claude is great at solving all these things," she said.
In the meantime, companies are likely to continue to jockey for position over price.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put that strategy into sharp relief since his company released a series of new advanced models under the GPT-5.6 banner to compete with Anthropic's Fable 5.
"GPT-5.6 sol is half the price and ~twice as token efficient as fable in many cases for accomplishing the same task," Altman wrote on X on Tuesday. "happy to deliver at one-quarter of the price."
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