Uber Technologies has introduced monthly usage caps of $1,500 per AI coding tool for employees after exhausting its annual AI budget earlier this year. According to a Bloomberg News report, the rideshare giant is limiting all employees to this spending limit per AI coding tool, including platforms such as Cursor and Claude Code. The company has implemented a dashboard system where every employee can track their usage across various tools, while also establishing a process for individuals to seek permission to exceed their normal cap. As per a Uber spokesperson, the move is aimed at managing costs while continuing AI adoption across teams, describing it as a straightforward way to responsibly encourage agentic AI adoption and experimentation at scale.
The spending caps come in response to Uber's growing embrace of AI tools internally, with Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga telling The Information in April that the company had already maxed out its full-year AI budget. Chief Executive Officer Dara Khosrowshahi revealed last month that about 10% of the company's code was submitted and built by AI agents, with legal and marketing teams seeing an uptick in usage. The limits, which have been instituted in recent months, apply specifically to agentic coding software such as Cursor or Anthropic's Claude Code, with spending on one tool not affecting the budget for another. The company has also indicated it will moderate the overall pace of hiring relative to its plans entering the year as a result of benefits from using AI internally.
The case is far from isolated in the enterprise AI sector. Microsoft reportedly scaled back internal Claude Code licenses after per-engineer costs hit $500 to $2,000 monthly across its engineering teams. Uber reportedly exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April, with COO Andrew MacDonald noting that costs were becoming harder to justify under current usage patterns. Amazon even shut down an internal AI usage leaderboard after employees were gaming the system with low-value prompts, inflating infrastructure expenses without delivering meaningful productivity gains. Earlier in May, OpenClaw's creator revealed they had burned through $1.3 million in OpenAI API tokens in a single month, while in April, a Google Cloud customer woke up to an $18,000 bill despite having only $7 in the budget following a security breach.
The implementation of usage caps reflects broader industry challenges as companies balance AI adoption with cost management. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains uncertain, with COO Andrew MacDonald noting on the Rapid Response podcast that it's very hard to draw a line between AI usage metrics and actual production of useful consumer features. As per MacDonald, while some underlying metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction, it remains unclear whether leaning into AI tools is translating into more new features for customers. The company's shares hit a session low, extending declines to trade 2.7% lower as investors assess the impact of AI spending controls on future growth prospects.
