Anthropic agent tool credit meter

Summary

Anthropic is bringing back third-party agent tool support on paid Claude plans but gating it behind a separate credit meter. The change reflects the consumption gap between human users (dozens to hundreds of prompts/day) and autonomous agents (thousands of requests). ServiceNow and Uber cited as having burned through their entire annual AI token budgets already. OpenAI countering with two months free Codex for new business customers.

Implications

• Feeds the token economics competition thread: first concrete signal that agent-scale consumption is forcing pricing structure changes at Anthropic. The separate credit meter creates a two-tier consumption model within a single subscription.
• The ServiceNow/Uber budget exhaustion data point is the strongest evidence yet that enterprise AI adoption economics are unsustainable at current pricing. Enterprise customers planned for human-scale usage; agents consumed at 10-100x the rate.
• OpenAI’s counter-offer (free Codex) is a customer acquisition play during Anthropic’s pricing transition — classic competitive timing.
• Feeds the enterprise deployment as battleground thread: pricing pressure is now bilateral. Anthropic tightening while OpenAI loosening creates a visible switching incentive.