By Mukundan Sivaraj · AIM Media House
Uber exhausted its annual budget for AI coding tools within the first months of 2026 as internal adoption scaled faster than expected, according to a report by The Information .
Chief Technology Officer Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company is “back to the drawing board” after usage of tools such as Claude Code exceeded financial assumptions. “I’m back to the drawing board, because the budget I thought I would need is blown away already,” Naga said, according to the same report.
Other reports citing the same disclosure noted that Uber’s AI coding spend reached its full-year allocation within months. The company reported that about 95% of its engineers use AI tools monthly, with internal systems generating roughly 1,800 code changes each week.
Nearly 70% of code committed to production now involves AI-generated output, according to Business Insider . AI Adoption Moves From Assistive to Autonomous A month earlier, Uber said AI systems were generating 31% of its total codebase , with autonomous agents opening 11% of pull requests.
The figures were shared by company engineers at the Pragmatic Summit in March. This level of adoption offers a view into the shift in software development, where AI tools are becoming part of standard engineering workflows. Across the industry, AI coding tools are used across software development workflows.
A study of enterprise engineering teams found that 63% of companies now use AI tools in most of their development processes, according to Business Insider.
Uber built internal infrastructure to support that shift, including a Model Context Protocol gateway, an Agent Builder platform, and a command-line interface for deploying and managing AI agents. These systems connect AI models to internal code repositories, documentation, and engineering workflows.
This internal infrastructure allows AI systems to access production data and services directly, which enables them to perform multi-step tasks that go beyond code suggestions.
Continue on AIM Media House