> The ride-hailing company has introduced usage caps, limiting employees to $1,500 in monthly token spending on individual AI tools, after blowing through its entire AI 2026 budget by April.

Right, because they set their 2026 budget in 2025. And in 2025 nobody could predict how good (and token-hungry) coding agents would get after November 2025.

I'd be surprised if any company that set an AI budget for 2026 hasn't blown through it by now, assuming their staff have picked up Claude Code or Copilot or Cowork.

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ofjcihen 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think this probably has more to do with companies switching to API pricing for enterprises, no?

Regardless, the C-suite wouldn’t be performing due diligence if they weren’t at least attempting to perform the calculus of “what are we getting out of this spend?” and what we’re seeing now is them looking for the justification.

Didn’t Uber mention that they’re having a hard time tying all of that spend to any new or improved features?

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simonw 4 hours ago | parent [-]

I think it's both. Last year even the most AI-hungry companies had employees who were primarily using ChatGPT and Claude. It's really hard to burn a noticeable number of tokens with those tools.

The moment you have Claude Code or Codex running in a loop - or in multiple streams (something that people don't really do with chat because it returns fast enough there's no point running them in parallel) your token usage goes through the roof.

And then by May this year both OpenAI and Anthropic had migrated their enterprise pricing to API costs, not fixed subscription per month costs. That wouldn't have made much of a difference in the pre-coding-agent era, but today it means $100s or $1000s per employee per month.

	▲	ofjcihen 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That’s fair. I mean like any other service it’s going to need some cost analysis. I figure we’ll go from over usage to a shock leading to under usage and then land somewhere in the middle when companies decide what works for them.

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asadotzler 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

A CEO unable to predict or even imagine a few months down the road, who bets everything on the current state of things, is a shitty CEO.