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Uber's token frenzy reached new heights, consuming all their planned 2026 allocation amount of AI tokens in the first four months of this year on agentic tools like Cursor and Anthropic's Claude Code, in what you could view as the ChatGPT-powered company's code budget getting out of hand. 

As a report by Uber's CTO, Praveen Neppalli Naga, indicates, beginning engineers did a lot of work with synthetic code authoring tools, such as Claude Code, and approximately 11% of Uber's live backend code enhancements were totally composed by synthetic code agents. These tools were even encouraged to be used by engineers who were even ranked internally on their usage.

Now, the ride-hailing behemoth has put the brakes on the spending of its employees on each tool to $1,500 capped monthly. 

Andrew Macdonald, COO of Uber, also questioned the value of AI's productiveness, saying that it is "very hard to draw a line" between the use of AI and Uber's offering new attributes to its users.

Uber is not the only company to report the move away from Claude code licenses towards relying on the Alpha code from GitHub Copilot; Microsoft also reportedly did the same. The tech sector is now faced with a crucial query: Where is the ROI from AI investments?