Simon Willison argues rumors of Microsoft and Uber slashing developer AI budgets due to high costs lack strong evidence
Anthropic is rumored to be nearing its first profitable quarter
@Austen It was the CTO who said that about the budget - the COO did reference that in a bit of the quote that I left out because it was harder to edit into non-speaking-prose
Austen Allred@AustenIf this is the source the Uber COO didn’t say anything vaguely related to Uber having spent their entire annual AI budget in the first few months. If he actually said that there would be thousands of people from Uber who can corroborate. Is that story fake too?
@Austen I don't think "we spent our 2026 budget in 4 months" is particularly notable given that the budget would have been set in 2025 when nobody knew how good Claude Code et al were about to get as-of January
Simon Willison@simonw@Austen It was the CTO who said that about the budget - the COO did reference that in a bit of the quote that I left out because it was harder to edit into non-speaking-prose
@Austen I wrote a little bit more about the Uber CTO thing on my blog https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#the-ai-failure-stories-around-this-are-pretty-thin
Simon Willison@simonw@Austen I don't think "we spent our 2026 budget in 4 months" is particularly notable given that the budget would have been set in 2025 when nobody knew how good Claude Code et al were about to get as-of January
I'm suspicious of that that whole story about Uber blowing their AI budget and being disappointed in the results - I dug into it and it appears to have been built on very shaky foundations
Links to original sources: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#the-ai-failure-stories-around-this-are-pretty-thin
Simon Willison@simonwI'm suspicious of that that whole story about Uber blowing their AI budget and being disappointed in the results - I dug into it and it appears to have been built on very shaky foundations
Here's an extended edit of the quote that includes a following fragment where Andrew Macdonald called the trade "harder to justify" - full, unedited transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/59096a338c82f6f95e40e3d7c7b5bad9
![But then you sometimes go and talk to your senior engineering leaders and you’re saying, OK, how many projects that were on the cutting room floor got moved above the line because of the productivity gains because 25% of our code commits were via Claude Code last quarter?
That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there’s more that is getting shipped. But it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, OK, now we’re actually producing like 25% more useful consumer features, right? And that line is hard to draw.
[...] And so if you’re not actually able to draw a direct line to how much useful features and functionality you’re shipping to your users, that trade becomes harder to justify.](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HJfYssZbEAA1q1Y.png)
Simon Willison@simonwLinks to original sources: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/27/product-market-fit/#the-ai-failure-stories-around-this-are-pretty-thin
I regret having missed that "harder to justify" line from my original quote, the paragraph it's embedded in was a little bit mangled but I should have worked harder to edit that in
Simon Willison@simonwHere's an extended edit of the quote that includes a following fragment where Andrew Macdonald called the trade "harder to justify" - full, unedited transcript is here: https://gist.github.com/simonw/59096a338c82f6f95e40e3d7c7b5bad9
#1540Austen Allred@AUSTENIf this is the source the Uber COO didn’t say anything vaguely related to Uber having spent their entire annual AI budget in the first few months.
If he actually said that there would be thousands of people from Uber who can corroborate.
Is that story fake too?
Simon Willison@simonwI'm suspicious of that that whole story about Uber blowing their AI budget and being disappointed in the results - I dug into it and it appears to have been built on very shaky foundations