Uber president says AI spending is getting 'harder to justify'
Uber President and COO Andrew Macdonald said on the Rapid Response podcast that the company exhausted its 2026 budget for Claude Code within about four months and that it is difficult to draw a clear link between rising AI token usage and delivery of more useful consumer features. Reports note Uber spent about $3.4 billion on research and development in 2025 and company leaders are discussing token consumption versus headcount as AI costs grow.
{"error":"The service was not able to process your request"}
Key Points
- 1Andrew Macdonald said "That link is not there yet" when asked whether increased token use for coding tools like Claude Code is translating into materially more useful consumer features.
- 2Multiple reports say Uber exhausted its Claude Code budget for 2026 in roughly four months after encouraging internal adoption.
- 3Uber reported about $3.4 billion in research and development spending in 2025, and executives have discussed weighing token costs against headcount.
Scoring Rationale
The COO's public comments call into question the near-term ROI of enterprise AI spending at a major platform company and touch on budget, tooling, and tradeoffs that could influence other firms; impact is meaningful but not immediately market-moving.
Sources
Public references used for this report.
View 6 more sources
- Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it's worth itfortune.com
- Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in four months. Now its COO is questioning whether it’s worth itfinance.yahoo.com
- Uber's COO says it's getting harder to justify the money spent on AI tokenmaxxingafrica.businessinsider.com
- Uber COO Andrew Macdonald says AI spending hard to justifyqz.com
- Uber Boss Seems Unsure About All Those Billions Spent On AI Slopkotaku.com
- AI spending is getting 'harder to justify' says Uber presidentshacknews.com
Practice with real Ad Tech data
90 SQL & Python problems · 15 industry datasets
250 free problems · No credit card
See all Ad Tech problems
