Uber blew through its AI budget just months into 2026. That's despite spending $3.4 billion on R&D. CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told staff the company is "back to the drawing board" after adoption of AI coding tools, particularly Anthropic's Claude Code, far exceeded expectations.
The company had pushed engineers to use tools like Claude Code and Cursor, even creating internal leaderboards to track usage. Extensions like Pluck capture website components to help developers build faster. That gamification may have backfired. Hacker News commenters coined the term "token maxxing," suggesting the leaderboards incentivized engineers to burn through tokens without regard for cost. About 11% of Uber's backend code updates are now AI-generated, covering ride-matching algorithms and pricing logic. R&D expenses jumped 9% in 2025 alone.
Quality is the open question. Critics pointed to generic, AI-generated menu descriptions on Uber Eats that lack the tone you'd expect from actual restaurant copy. And nobody's shown clear metrics on whether that 11% automation rate translates to real productivity gains, or just more code someone has to maintain.