Uber Caps Employee AI Tool Spending at $1,500 a Month After Burning Through 2026 Budget
Updated
Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 2
Uber Caps Employee AI Tool Spending at $1,500 a Month After Burning Through 2026 Budget
3 articles · Updated · TechCrunch · Jun 2
$1,500 is now the monthly cap Uber has set per employee and per agentic coding tool, including Claude Code and Cursor, with exceptions requiring approval.
The clampdown follows Uber exhausting its annual AI budget in just four months after pushing staff to use AI heavily and tracking usage on internal leaderboards.
Employees can monitor their own spending through an internal dashboard as the company tries to rein in what it described as exorbitant AI costs.
Uber's pullback also reflects wider doubts about AI returns after CEO Andrew Macdonald said it is hard to link usage directly to new consumer features.