Uber president says AI spending is getting ‘harder to justify’

uber president and coo andrew macdonald revealed that the company has exhausted its annual ai budget only four months into the fiscal year, citing a lack of clear returns on investment. he specifically noted that rising token consumption for tools like claude code does not currently correlate with the shipment of more useful features for consumers, making the increasing costs difficult to justify. the company spent $3.4 billion on research and development in 2025, up 9% from the previous year, as it attempts to integrate ai into its operations. to balance these escalating expenses, ceo dara khosrowshahi previously stated that uber is reducing human headcount to fund ai investments. macdonald emphasized that the company must eventually demonstrate a direct line between token spend and productive output to validate the economics of replacing human labor with ai.