Uber COO Andrew Macdonald says rising AI token costs are hard to justify after exhausting its 2026 Claude Code budget
Uber is slowing down hiring to offset the ballooning costs
#37François Chollet@FCHOLLETDeveloper productivity is hard to manage.
Ed Zitron@edzitronUber’s COO has said that it’s getting “harder to justify” its AI costs because there was no way to show a link between AI spend and any meaningful increase in useful features. This is the first time I’ve seen a company say this directly. https://www.businessinsider.com/uber-coo-andrew-macdonald-ai-token-spending-harder-justify-2026-5
If enough other companies report the same, the bubble pops. 🫧
@haydenfield my take: https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/if-enough-other-companies-report?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios
Hayden Field@haydenfieldDare I say the AI money squeeze is and has been here? 👉 https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/917380/ai-monetization-anthropic-openai-token-economics-revenue
#455Hieu Pham@HYHIEU226MSFT cancelling Claude Code sub internally is most likely fake news, but companies having a hard time justifying AI spending is real. However, it's mostly a skill issue. AI turns a 10x engineer into a 100x one, but also turns an incompetent one into a coding slopping machine.
Only one interview from only one company COO (Uber), but hopefully companies will start waking up to the very well-known fact that incentivizing the potential input into something useful (consumer products), rather than the output, is a *very bad idea*.
