Uber recently introduced caps for internal AI use in order amid spiraling costs for the technology. According to Bloomberg, the company has instituted a new rule that places a monthly $1,500 cap per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Anthropic’s Claude Code or Cursor.
The usage is trackable via an internal dashboard that each employee has access to, although the company says employees can exceed the caps with permission.
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This comes after the company’s CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga in April said it had blown through its entire annual AI budget in a matter of four months. This comes after Uber encouraged staff to use AI “as much as possible” and even ranked their internal usage competitively on internal leader boards, according to a previous report.
Uber’s COO Andrew Macdonald recently expressed his doubts about AI’s impact on productivity. “It’s very hard to draw a line” between AI usage and new consumer features, he said in a podcast.
Macdonald had also said it’s hard to draw a connection between the company’s rising use of Claude Code and innovations meant to serve consumers. “That link is not there yet,” he said.
“Maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and ‘Okay now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features,” he added.
Macdonald also noted that “if you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how [many] useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify,” referring to the cost of AI.
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This comes as a growing number of tech companies are beginning to question whether the massive cost of generative AI is sustainable, even as the industry continues to market artificial intelligence as the future of work. An X post recently claimed that “Amazon has reportedly scrapped its internal AI leaderboard as costs soared,” adding that a senior executive told staff: “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”
Another post on X cited several examples of companies struggling to control AI-related spending. It claimed that one company spent $500 million on Claude in a single month because no usage limits were in place. The post also alleged that Microsoft had canceled most Claude Code licenses after token costs spiraled. Separately, The Verge reported that Microsoft has been scaling back access to Anthropic’s Claude Code for many employees.