Major tech companies are struggling to justify the skyrocketing prices of heavy AI usage, with even major tech firms like Microsoft and Uber looking at changes to their AI process. Following the recent viral post from Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga that the company had blown through its entire 2026 AI budget in just a few months, Uber's Operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said that token usage just didn't seem to have a direct correlation with useful consumer features.

Microsoft began revoking its developers' access to the Claude Code programming assistant earlier this month, with plans to move them over to the internal Copilot CLI tool by June 30. Although that has been framed as consolidating its teams onto the tools it's developing, it also comes right at the end of Microsoft's fiscal year, suggesting it may have also been a move to cut costs before the new year.