Uber Burns $3.4B AI Budget, Shifts to Codex
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- Uber spent $3.4 B on R&D in 2025 and exhausted its AI budget months into 2026.
- Anthropic launched Opus 4.7 on April 19, yet Uber's rapid adoption of its Claude Code tool drove costs higher than projected.
- Claude Code became Uber's top AI coding assistant, accounting for a sharp rise in AI‑generated backend updates that now cover ~11 % of live code changes.
- OpenAI is slated for Codex testing at Uber as the firm expands its AI stack beyond Claude, reflecting a broader industry pivot to enterprise coding tools.
- Praveen Neppalli Naga (Uber CTO) says the company is back to the drawing board, signaling a strategic reassessment of AI spending and tooling.
Why it matters: Uber loses cash as its $3.4 B AI budget is spent early, forcing the rideshare giant to curb AI tooling and slowing broader enterprise adoption of costly coding assistants.
