14h ago

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

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Original post
OPGary Marcus, MIT PhD and NYU Professor Emeritus#153Gary Marcus, MIT PhD and NYU Professor Emeritus@GARYMARCUS

If other companies report the same, the bubble pops. 🫧

4:33 PM · May 25, 2026 View on X
Reposted by
Alexia Jolicoeur-Martineau#486@JM_ALEXIA
REPLYGary Marcus, MIT PhD and NYU Professor Emeritus#153Gary Marcus, MIT PhD and NYU Professor Emeritus@GARYMARCUS

@haydenfield my take: https://open.substack.com/pub/garymarcus/p/if-enough-other-companies-report?r=8tdk6&utm_medium=ios

Hayden FieldHayden Field@haydenfield

Dare 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

12:26 PM · May 26, 2026 · 1.2K Views
1:55 PM · May 26, 2026 · 41 Views
QUOTE POSTHieu Pham#455Hieu Pham@HYHIEU226

MSFT 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.

1:34 AM · May 26, 2026 · 6.2K Views
POSTAlex Imas#1777Alex Imas@ALEXOLEGIMAS

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*.

businessinsider.com
Uber's COO says it's getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxing
Operations chief Andrew Macdonald said he's not seeing proportional productivity gains from increasing AI costs within Uber.
12:15 PM · May 26, 2026 · 1.8K Views