Uber Told Everyone to Use AI. They Blew the Budget in 4 Months.

Uber told its engineers to use AI aggressively and built an internal leaderboard ranking teams by usage. By April, the company had burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget.

Uber responded by capping employees at $1,500 a month per coding tool. The company had been using tools like Claude Code and Cursor, while some engineers were running up thousands of dollars in monthly token costs.

Juan and Kate break down how the leaderboard helped drive the spending, why roughly 10% of Uber’s code is now built by AI agents, and the bigger question companies are starting to face: what happens when AI adoption grows faster than the return on investment?

They also get into rising agentic AI costs, Microsoft Copilot pricing, tokenmaxxing, and three ways companies can get AI spending under control before the bill gets worse.

ABOUT SLOP WORLD

AI news with receipts. Juan Faisal and Kate Cook fact-check the claims Big Tech is making about AI, follow the money, and break down what it actually means for your job, your data, and your daily life. From leaked data and corporate cover-ups to AI schools, stolen identities, and layoff headlines that don't add up, we cover the AI stories that everyone's hyping but nobody's verifying. New episodes every Saturday.

DISCLAIMER

All content is commentary and opinion based on publicly available documents, interviews, and verifiable sources. References to "scams," "grifts," or related terms reflect our editorial opinion, not legal conclusions. Anyone featured who believes a statement is inaccurate may contact us.

CHAPTERS

00:00 Uber Burned a Year of AI Budget in 4 Months

00:38 What Uber Gave Its Engineers: Cursor and Claude Code

01:57 The Leaderboard That Turned AI Into a Competition

03:13 The $1,500 Cap, the Dashboard, and the Stock Dip

06:10 Who AI Coding Tools Actually Benefit Most

08:09 Microsoft Copilot Raises Prices: It's Not Just Coding

10:19 Tokenmaxxing and the Education Gap

12:03 Three Ways to Get Your AI Costs Under Control

13:47 Sometimes the Best Tool Is Your Own Brain