Exponential growth in demand is one of the sustaining assumptions of the AI bubble. This looks like something else

Following up on our tokenmaxing post.

Companies are starting to question whether soaring AI spending is delivering meaningful returns. An AI consultant tells us a client recently spent half a billion dollars in a month after failing to put usage limits on Claude licenses for employees.

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— Axios (@axios.com) May 28, 2026 at 10:15 AM

 


Aditi Bharadewriting for Business Insider: 

In a Rapid Response interview released on Saturday, Uber's operations chief, Andrew Macdonald, said it was becoming harder to justify AI costs within the company.

He said that Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral after telling The Information in an April interview that Uber had already blown through its Claude Code budget for 2026.

The comment led to what he described as a "head-exploding moment," sparking discussions about AI token consumption within the company and the trade-offs it creates, such as on head count.

He said that, based on talks with Uber's senior engineering leaders, he realized higher token usage did not translate into a proportional increase in useful consumer features.

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Macdonald added that AI can seem free if you're "just a user sitting there coming up with interesting use cases" without paying for it. But ultimately, the company foots the bill.

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Duolingo, for instance, walked back its decision to include AI usage in performance reviews after employees asked whether they had to use AI for the sake of using it.

"It felt like, rather than being held accountable for the actual outcome, we were trying to just push something that in some cases did not fit," Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn said in a podcast interview in April.

Coding veteran Carl Brown has long been one of the sanest voices on the subject, so it's not surprising he has one of the best takes.