Uber burned through $3.4 billion on AI tools and now CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga says the company is "back to the drawing board." Usage costs blew past expectations after the company aggressively rolled out AI coding assistants like Anthropic's Claude Code and Cursor to its engineering teams. About 11% of Uber's live backend code is now AI-generated, with Claude Code dominating developer workflows.
The budget blowout wasn't accidental. Uber ran internal leaderboards tracking how much developers used these AI tools. The result: engineers burned through tokens to climb the rankings rather than focusing on efficient, quality output. The practice became known internally as "token maxxing." Without solid data on code quality or maintenance costs, that 11% figure tells you about adoption, not value. The governance failure here is the real story.
Uber has been here before. The company sank over $2.5 billion into autonomous vehicles between 2015 and 2020 before CEO Dara Khosrowshahi sold the division to Aurora Innovation. That was a multi-year hardware play. This time the burn came faster, driven by per-token API costs at scale. The AI-generated menu descriptions now showing up on Uber Eats don't exactly inspire confidence that the spending went to the right places.