Uber Exhausts Its 2026 AI Budget by April as Claude Code Usage Surges

Uber's CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga told The Information that the company's planned 2026 AI budget was used up by April. Claude Code adoption rose from 32% to 84% of about 5,000 engineers after its December 2025 rollout, with reported costs of $150 to $250 per engineer per month on average and $500 to $2,000 for power users. The report also cites a FinOps Foundation survey in which 73% of 1,192 practitioners said AI costs exceeded projections.

Why it matters: Per-seat budgets break down under per-token coding agents, so teams need per-engineer metering and model routing to control spend before it outruns the plan.