Uber burned its entire $3.4B AI budget in four months, and the COO can't prove it did anything

Uber handed Claude Code and Cursor to 5,000 engineers, built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by AI usage, and hit 84-95% monthly adoption. Per-engineer cost ran $500 to $2,000 a month. The 2026 AI budget, all $3.4B of it, was gone by April. COO Andrew Macdonald said the ROI link "is not there yet" and coined a word for the failure mode: tokenmaxxing. Rising token consumption with no proportional gain in output. Fortune ran it, and Fortune's follow-up basically declared tokenmaxxing dead on arrival.

It gets worse. Axios reported an unnamed enterprise ran up roughly $500M on Claude in a single 30-day window after setting zero spending limits on employee licenses. Employees were burning frontier-model calls to check the weather. Fast Company has the details. Then Cloudflare's CTO started enforcing hard limits and cancelled most internal Claude Code licenses (Hacker News). And Sam Altman, of all people, told CNBC that AI-spending criticism is "the most fair criticism right now" and admitted there's "a ton of waste" (CNBC).

Three companies. Then a fourth voice from the top of the food chain. Something's happening, and it's not the hype cycle peaking. It's the bill arriving.

Here's my read from actually living this. The leaderboard was the mistake. The moment you gamify usage, you've decoupled spend from value by design. You're paying people to consume tokens. I use Claude Code every day in my personal projects, and the months I spent the most were not the months I shipped the most. They were the months I was thrashing. High token burn is often a signal of a confused agent, not a productive one.

What builders should do: cap usage at the team level before you scale, not after. Instrument output, not consumption. Tie a dollar figure to merged PRs, closed tickets, shipped features, anything real, and watch that ratio. If your AI cost-per-merged-PR is climbing, you don't have an adoption problem, you have a thrashing problem. And kill any leaderboard that ranks usage. Rank outcomes or rank nothing.