“The budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Praveen Neppalli Naga said in an interview with The Information. The cause was Claude Code, Anthropic’s AI coding assistant, whose use inside Uber’s engineering teams had surged past every projection the company had made.

Neppalli Naga’s comments illustrate the challenge for companies trying to take advantage of new AI tools while keeping costs under control.

AI coding tools don’t behave like traditional software. The cost isn’t fixed. It rises with use. Each interaction consumes compute, measured in tokens, and the cost of those tokens add up quickly. At Uber’s scale, usage didn’t grow steadily. It surged. And costs followed faster than anyone expected.

Usage Scaled Faster Than Anyone Planned

Uber uses Claude Code to write and improve code across its back-end systems, the infrastructure that matches drivers and riders, sets prices, and launches new product features. The company also used it to build its recently launched Earner Assistant, an AI agent that helps drivers find high-paying trips.

Neppalli Naga told The Information that roughly 11% of live updates to Uber’s back-end systems are now written by AI agents built primarily with Claude Code, up from a fraction of a percent three months ago.

Uber created internal leaderboards ranking engineers by AI usage, actively pushing adoption. Claude Code usage soared from the end of last year while usage of a competing tool, Cursor, plateaued.

Uber’s research and development expenses rose 9% to $3.4 billion in 2025. The company said in a recent securities filing it expects that figure to keep climbing. Neppalli Naga wouldn’t disclose exact AI spending figures.

Anthropic Moves to Charge by Consumption

The pricing structure enterprises had been working with has since changed. Anthropic moved enterprise customers to usage-based billing in recent weeks, as PYMNTS reported. Customers of Claude Enterprise now pay for computing capacity consumed plus a flat monthly per-user fee. Previously, they paid up to $200 per licensed user monthly for a set amount of discounted usage.

Fredrik Filipsson, co-founder of Redress Compliance, a firm that helps businesses negotiate software licensing agreements, told The Information the changes could double or triple costs for heavy users. Several IT executives told the publication they’re monitoring whether the new pricing will produce substantially higher bills. Anthropic said the changes don’t apply to businesses with fewer than 150 users.

The pricing shift extends beyond enterprise accounts. Anthropic also began charging Claude Code subscribers more to use the tool with third-party software, as PYMNTS reported. As of April 4, subscribers can no longer use their Claude subscription limits for third-party tools including OpenClaw, an open-source personal AI assistant. They must now pay through a separate pay-as-you-go option. Anthropic said the policy applies to all third-party tools connected to Claude Code.

Boris Cherny, Anthropic’s head of Claude Code, said the company’s subscriptions “weren’t built for the usage patterns of these third-party tools” and that it was attempting to manage growth sustainably.

What Enterprises Are Now Recalculating

AI tools that embedded themselves inside engineering workflows as productivity aids are now line items with variable, consumption-driven costs. Enterprises that adopted them at scale without modeling actual usage are finding invoices that don’t match budgets.

Organizational readiness remains the most cited barrier to AI adoption at large companies. Some 71% of executives at companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue identify it as the primary limit on AI performance, according to PYMNTS data. Only 11% said the technology itself is the barrier.

Neppalli Naga said his vision is for AI agents to eventually take on full software engineering roles, writing, testing and deploying code without human involvement. Uber said it continues to calibrate hiring based on broader business needs.

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