Uber CTO Claims Claude Code Blew Annual Budget: 11% of Backend Code Now AI-Written, Transitioning to 'AI-First Software Engineering'

According to Dynamic Beating monitoring, Uber's Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga recently stated that due to the surging usage of Anthropic's programming tool Claude Code, Uber's AI budget for the full year 2026 has already been depleted in the early months of the year. He admitted to starting over as the originally envisioned budget scale has been completely shattered.

Uber has established an internal "leaderboard" to encourage engineers to maximize AI utilization. Currently, Uber is using both Claude Code and Cursor, but since the end of last year, Claude's usage has seen explosive growth, while Cursor has entered a plateau phase. Naga revealed that about 11% of real-time code updates in Uber's backend systems are now written by AI agents primarily built on Claude Code, a percentage that was less than 1% just three months ago.

Uber's vision is to transition from "software engineering" to "agent-based software engineering," where AI agents autonomously handle end-to-end tasks of code writing, testing, and deployment. They plan to create "supervisory agents" to audit errors in other agents. Although Naga mentioned that slowing down the recruitment of software engineers is not currently under consideration, the budget overage pressure suggests that their workforce strategy may be adjusted in line with technological deployment progress.