$29 a month: Accenture’s new Claude limit
The company will now centrally fund just $29 a month per person towards Claude Enterprise usage, effective October 1, according to an internal announcement seen by 404 Media. Several employees have told colleagues internally that their monthly bills run between $500 and $1,000, largely from heavy use of Claude Code. Under the new rules, anyone on the standard plan who goes past the $29 allowance needs a project or team to cover the rest.
Accenture, one of the world’s largest consulting firms and a vocal champion of AI adoption among its clients, has put a tight ceiling on how much it will pay for its own employees’ use of Anthropic’s Claude. That figure is small next to what some staff have been spending. The memo states that all Claude costs are now consumption-based. Any usage beyond the central allowance has to be funded through a Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS, which is Accenture’s internal billing code for a specific project or team.
Heavy Claude Code users are scrambling for Premium upgrades
Internal messages viewed by 404 Media show how the change has landed. One employee said their usage had crossed $500 for several months in a row and asked how to fast-track a move to Premium, adding that the upgrade option appeared blocked on the support page. Their monthly usage typically sits between $500 and $1,000.
Microsoft introduced division-level token budgets in July and switched its internal default to a cheaper model, with CoreAI EVP Jay Parikh telling staff that “tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for.
“Honestly, this is disappointing,” they wrote. A third employee said their access to the tool had been revoked altogether. Their concern was simple: the extra spend would now hit project costs. Another employee uses Claude Code extensively to build and test an AI accelerator meant for several Accenture clients. Accenture is not the first big company to rethink open-ended AI budgets.
Months earlier, its Experiences and Devices group cancelled most Claude Code licences and moved engineers to GitHub Copilot CLI.