Uber burns 2026 AI budget in 4 months on Claude Code

According to a WIRED report by Steven Levy, AI agents are wreaking havoc on tech company budgets, with Uber as the prime example. Uber's CTO, Pravin Nepali Naga, disclosed that developers using Anthropic's Claude Code consumed the company's entire 2026 AI budget in only four months. The numbers are staggering: 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly, and roughly 70% of all code uploaded to the platform is AI-generated. The cost for API tokens per developer skyrocketed from $500 to $2,000 per month, forcing the company to reallocate funds and slow hiring.

Uber isn't alone. Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn recently killed a policy that required employees to use AI as part of their performance evaluations. Uber's COO Andrew Macdonald highlighted a deeper concern: the massive spike in token usage isn't translating into new features for users, making the ROI difficult to justify. As a result, tech companies are being forced to slow hiring and shift budgets just to cover the runaway costs of autonomous AI systems — a sign that the agent era is both powerful and expensive.