Uber's operations chief says AI is not delivering value for money at the company yet
Uber's CTO went viral after revealing the company had already exhausted its Claude Code budget for 2026
A senior Uber executive has said that artificial intelligence is not yet giving the company sufficient return on its investment.
In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber's operations chief Andrew Macdonald said it was becoming increasingly difficult to justify AI costs within the company.
The Claude Code moment that sparked internal debate
Macdonald said that Uber's chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already exhausted its entire Claude Code budget for 2026.
He described the revelation as a "head-exploding moment" that prompted internal discussions about AI token consumption and the trade-offs it creates — including on headcount.
Following conversations with Uber's senior engineering leaders, Macdonald said he concluded that higher token usage was not translating into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.
"That link is not there yet, right?" he said. "I think maybe implicitly there is 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 25% more useful consumer features.'"
He added that the trade-off costs associated with AI were difficult to justify precisely because that direct link remained absent. Earlier this month, chief executive Dara Khosrowshahi said during an earnings call that Uber was slowing hiring in order to offset its AI investments.
AI can seem free — until it isn't
Macdonald noted that AI can appear cost-free to individual users who are "just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases" without personally paying for it — but that the company ultimately bears the financial burden.
A broader shift in attitude
Whilst major technology firms have been embracing so-called tokenmaxxing — using AI as extensively as possible — and evaluating employees on the basis of their AI usage, some companies are beginning to push back.
Duolingo reversed its decision to incorporate AI usage into performance reviews after employees questioned whether they were being asked to use the technology for its own sake rather than for genuine outcomes.
"It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit," Duolingo chief executive Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.
