Uber Burns Entire 2026 AI Budget on Claude Code in Four Months — 95% of Engineers Now Use AI Tools, 70% of Committed Code AI-Generated

Briefs / Hacker News·high signal

Uber exhausted its annual AI tooling budget by April 2026 after rolling out Claude Code to its engineering team in December 2025. Usage doubled by February; individual engineers incurred $500–$2,000/month in API costs against a $3.4B total R&D budget. The CTO said they're 'back to the drawing board' on AI budgeting. The story (397 points, 469 comments on HN) is the sharpest signal yet of the enterprise cost forecasting problem: when developer productivity tools are too valuable to limit but too expensive at unplanned adoption rates.