New Delhi, May 25 -- Microsoft has reportedly begun cancelling the majority of its direct Claude Code licences, redirecting its engineering workforce towards GitHub Copilot CLI instead. The reversal comes only six months after the technology giant opened access to Claude Code across thousands of its developers, project managers, designers, and other staff, encouraging broad experimentation with AI-assisted coding.

Adoption was swift and enthusiastic. It was, perhaps, too swift. The sheer scale at which employees embraced the tool has now prompted the firm to pull back on technology its own engineers had grown to depend on, according to a report by The Verge.

The decision does not affect Microsoft's broader commercial relationship with A...