Uber Exhausted Its Full 2026 AI Budget by April as Token Costs Spiral

Uber deployed Anthropic's Claude Code to around 5,000 engineers in December 2025 and burned through its entire annual AI budget by April 2026, with Microsoft also canceling internal Claude Code licenses over uncontrolled token costs. Despite per-token inference prices falling roughly 75% year-over-year, enterprise AI spending surged from $1.7 billion in 2023 to $37 billion in 2025, a pattern economists attribute to Jevons' paradox, where greater efficiency drives higher total consumption. Agentic workflows are a key accelerant, consuming 10 to 100 times more tokens than standard chat sessions because agents resend the full conversation context on every tool call. Reasoning-optimized models, which carry higher per-token costs, grew from negligible usage to over 50% of all enterprise tokens by late 2025, further inflating bills. Analysts warn that without deliberate token governance frameworks, companies will continue facing sudden budget overruns as AI adoption expands.