Uber's Anthropic AI Push Hits a Wall — CTO Says Budget Blown Despite $3.4B R&D Spend (93pts HN)

Yahoo Finance·high signal

Uber's aggressive rollout of Anthropic's Claude Code blew past internal budget expectations, with AI-related costs up 6x since 2024. CTO Sundeep Gupta accidentally spent $1,200 in two hours on Claude Code, exposing unpredictable usage-based billing. Engineers were ranked on internal leaderboards by AI tool usage, incentivizing adoption that became uncontrollable — Uber is now 'back to the drawing board' on AI spend strategy. This is the first major enterprise to publicly admit AI coding tool costs are spiraling.