Corporate AI Assistant Rollouts Drive Up Costs as Uber CTO Says Budget Was Blown

Uber’s engineering teams rolled out Anthropic’s AI coding assistant Claude Code at scale to generate code, debug software and accelerate development. But its token-based pricing means productivity gains may not offset the expense, while making it harder for companies to budget using the fixed software-licensing model.

Uber Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga acknowledged that Claude Code exhausted its original full-year budget just two months after launch, while useful output did not rise in proportion to token consumption. Uber has not disclosed the actual dollar amount. It is now asking teams to curb usage and reassessing the cost-effectiveness of its AI tools.