Uber Burns Through Annual AI Budget in Four Months, Questions ROI

Uber president Andrew Macdonald said in a Saturday interview that the company has exhausted its 2026 AI budget and cannot connect rising Claude Code token consumption to tangible consumer benefits. The shortfall follows $3.4 billion in R&D spending last year. CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga indicated in April the Claude Code budget was already spent. The disconnect between computational intensity and measurable feature improvements reflects broader enterprise struggles to quantify LLM returns.