Reddit
Uber Burns Entire $3.4B 2026 AI Budget in 4 Months — COO Coins 'Tokenmaxxing', Cannot Link Usage to Consumer Features
Uber deployed Claude Code and Cursor to 5,000 engineers with an internal leaderboard ranking teams by AI usage, driving 84-95% monthly adoption and per-engineer costs of $500-$2,000/month — exhausting the entire 2026 AI budget by April. COO Andrew Macdonald publicly stated the ROI link 'is not there yet' and coined 'tokenmaxxing' to describe rising token consumption without proportional output gains. The story triggered a broader enterprise reckoning, with Fortune declaring 'tokenmaxxing is dead' and one AI consultant reporting a client spent half a billion dollars in a single month on unbounded Claude licenses.
Source
↳ Follow the thread