Given that Claude Code only got really good in November it’s entirely unsurprising to me that a budget set in 2025 may have failed to predict demand for that tool in 2026!
I'm suspicious of that that whole story about Uber blowing their AI budget and being disappointed in the results - I dug into it and it appears to have been built on very shaky foundations
Image 1: I started digging into this in response to a growing volume of stories claiming that large companies were sounding the alarm because their AI usage costs had grown so large. The most widely cited of these stories appear quite overblown to me. The most discussed has been Uber, based on this report where CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga indicated that Uber had “maxed out its full year AI budget just a few months into 2026”, mostly thanks to Claude Code. Given that Claude Code only got really good in November it’s entirely unsurprising to me that a budget set in 2025 may have failed to predict demand for that tool in 2026! That Uber story was further fueled by comments made by Uber’s COO, Andrew Macdonald, on the Rapid Response podcast. I tracked down the segment and there really isn’t much there. Here’s what Andrew said:
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Image 2: But then you sometimes go and talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying, OK, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via Claude Code last quarter? That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, OK, now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features, right? And that line is hard to draw. Somehow this fragment turned into headlines like Uber’s COO says it’s getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing, because the market for stories about AI failures remains enormous.
