Uber Cuts AI Token Costs After Burning Through Its 2026 Budget in Months
Updated
Updated · Yahoo Finance · Aug 7
Uber Cuts AI Token Costs After Burning Through Its 2026 Budget in Months
3 articles · Updated · Yahoo Finance · Aug 7
Summary
Uber says AI costs are falling even after it quadrupled the number of employees using frontier AI tools, prompting CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga to declare the “tokenmaxxing” era is ending.
Months after exhausting its 2026 AI budget, the company lowered cost per token by improving prompt caching, changing default models, testing cheaper options and showing engineers hourly AI usage and costs.
The shift marks a retreat from Uber’s earlier push to maximize tool use, including leaderboards that ranked software engineers on usage of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude Code.
Uber’s reset reflects broader pressure to prove AI returns: Deutsche Bank said last month productivity gains may still be years away, and Uber’s COO said in May the link between AI use and shipped features remained hard to measure.