After blowing through its entire 2026 AI budget in months, Uber CTO says, ‘We’re coming to the end of the so-called tokenmaxxing era’

Uber believes it’s found a solution to its AI spending problem after it blew through its budget for the technology in just the first few months of the year.

In an interview with The Information earlier this year, Uber chief technology officer Praveen Neppalli Naga admitted he went “back to the drawing board” on allotted spending after the rideshare giant encouraged employees to use its tools, particularly Anthropic’s Claude Code, as much as possible, even devising “leaderboards” to rank software engineers on their usage.  

The blitz was part of a trend in “tokenmaxxing,” or companies incentivizing workplace AI use, only for many to back off from the practice as they found it wasn’t offering the returns on investment to justify the rapid spending. While Uber was no exception, Naga said the company has now figured out a better way to deploy AI without breaking the bank.

“We’re seeing some very interesting trends on AI costs,” he wrote in an X post on Wedn...