Uber has become a case study for how quickly usage-based AI pricing can outrun corporate budgeting. Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said that the company exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April — just four months into the year — after Anthropic’s Claude Code spread across roughly 5,000 engineers faster than finance models had anticipated, according to press reports.
The ride-sharing service is not the only company suffering from sticker shock. Microsoft revoked developers’ Claude Code licenses months after enabling them, and a Priceline employee described a routine Cursor contract renewal coming back four to five times more expensive than expected. Companies that gorged on all-you-can-eat AI subscriptions in early 2025 are now scrambling to understand where their money went, pull back spending, and salvage some ROI from the wreckage of their budgets.
A new market of cost-management startups is emerging to help with that. Among them is Blackbox.ai, which aims to stop the overspend from happening by automatically routing each task to the most cost-effective AI model capable of handling it, instead of defaulting every request to a frontier, token-heavy model. Think of it as the orchestration execution layer for enterprise AI.
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