Accenture caps staff Claude spending at $29 a month, 404 Media reports

“Providing a WBS and obtaining a license does not guarantee indefinite or ongoing access to Claude.”

Accenture gave its staff that warning in an internal announcement about Claude, Anthropic’s AI model. The consulting firm now pays only $29 a month per person for Claude use, Joseph Cox reported for 404 Media on 15 October.

Some Accenture employees had been spending as much as $1,000 a month. The change took effect on 1 October, according to the announcement, which 404 Media has seen.

Accenture titled it “Claude Enterprise Users: Important Updates to Licensing and Usage Costs”.

The announcement says that “all costs are consumption-based”. Above the $29, an employee has to charge the extra use to a Work Breakdown Structure, or WBS. That is Accenture’s budget code for a specific project or team.

Premium plans come with $250 of token usage a week, 404 Media reported. Many employees are on the General plan instead.

The announcement also says Claude Enterprise stays available based on role and business need. Accenture reviews licences periodically and may move them to where they bring the most value.

Some employees now want Premium accounts, so that their projects avoid paying for the extra use. That is according to internal messages 404 Media viewed. One employee said their usage costs were above $500, as they had been in past months.

“How can I speed up the upgrade to a premium account? This obviously has a significant impact on project costs,” the employee wrote.

Another said they use Claude Code “extensively” to build and test an AI accelerator for several Accenture clients. Their usage usually runs between $500 and $1,000 a month. A third employee said Accenture had revoked their Claude access altogether.

An Accenture spokesperson told 404 Media that the company makes AI available to all its people.

“Our approach today is to provide the right tool for the right work, and we continue to invest in AI capabilities, skills and enablement that deliver greater value for clients and our own organization,” the spokesperson said.

Accenture has about 799,000 people and serves about 9,000 clients, according to its own figures. In September it invested in Within, an AI platform company, to help clients deploy AI agents.

The announcement cited Accenture’s own survey, in which 82% of more than 3,000 executives said they are increasing AI investment. 404 Media saw a “special irony” here. Accenture has encouraged clients to invest heavily in AI, and is now curbing its own staff’s use.

Other companies have already moved to cap employee AI spending. Microsoft set AI budgets for its divisions in August, and Atlassian’s engineers now work to an AI budget too. Uber’s technology chief said the tokenmaxxing era is ending.

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