San Francisco: Uber has strict spending limits on employee usage of AI-powered coding tools, including Anthropic's Claude Code and Cursor, after the ride-hailing giant exhausted its entire annual AI budget within the first four months of 2026.
The $1,500 Monthly Cap
Under the new policy, every employee is now limited to $1,500 per month in token spending per AI coding tool. This cap applies to each platform separately, meaning spending on Claude Code does not affect the budget for Cursor. Employees can track their real-time usage through an internal dashboard and request approval to exceed the limit for specific business needs.
A company spokesperson described the move as “a pretty straightforward way to responsibly encourage agentic AI adoption and experimentation at scale across the company”.
How Uber Burned Through Its Budget
Before the caps, Uber had aggressively pushed employees to incorporate AI into their workflows, with internal leaderboards even ranking staff based on usage levels. In April, Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga revealed that the company had already maxed out its full-year AI budget. The costs were big. Software engineers were paying token bills ranging from $500 to $2,000 a month. Neppalli Naga burned through $1,200 worth of tokens in just two hours during a live demonstration. ROI Questions Emerge
But Uber's leadership is questioning whether the AI spending is delivering tangible returns. As Chief Operating Officer Andrew Macdonald said on a recent podcast, it is “very hard to draw a line” between increasing usage in AI tokens and the delivery of more useful consumer features.
Macdonald described the budget blowout as a “head-exploding moment” that triggered company-wide conversations about the trade-off between AI spending and potential headcount. “If you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify,” he said.
Wider Industry Trend
Uber is not alone in curtailing AI costs. Microsoft recently started restricting internal access to Claude Code, telling employees to switch to GitHub Copilot CLI instead, with a June 30, 2026 deadline for the transition.
At Uber, however, AI is still deeply embedded in the culture. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi recently announced that about 10% of the company’s code is now being submitted and built by AI agents, with 95% of engineers using AI tools on a monthly basis.
