Uber is now limiting every employee to $1,500 in monthly token spending per AI coding tool, an Uber spokesperson told Bloomberg. The cap is applied per tool rather than combined, so spend on Cursor does not eat into the budget for Anthropic's Claude Code, and it applies only to agentic coding software. It follows reports that Uber ran through its 2026 AI budget in four months.
The number is more useful as a signal than as a cost-control story. Developer Simon Willison ran the math: assume two actively used tools per engineer and the cap works out to roughly $36,000 a year per head. Against the $330,000 median total compensation that levels.fyi lists for a US Uber software engineer, that is about 11% of pay the company will commit to agentic coding before it pulls the brake.
There is a second tell. The subsidised individual plans that let a solo developer run about $1,000 of tokens a month for $100 are not available to a company Uber's size; at that scale, you pay API prices. The cap is less a verdict on the tools than a marker of where their real cost lands once the subsidy disappears.