❯ Uber’s weekly AI agent requests up 9.4x while total AI spending has been flat since April

usage up, bill flatUber disclosed that weekly AI agent requests have grown 9.4x since February while total AI spending has held roughly flat since April. The turning point came in the first quarter, when the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in one go and its chief technology officer publicly questioned whether the money was well spent.

where the efficiency came fromOn the same model, cost per 1,000 requests is down nearly 34% from its April peak and cost per session is down 52% from its June high. The CTO changed his tone in August, saying “the so-called tokenmaxxing era is coming to an end,” with the next phase about using tokens more efficiently. AI agents now account for more than 70% of code-change submissions at the company.

how budgets get setThe curve gives enterprise technology leaders a citable precedent: a 10x jump in agent usage does not have to mean a 10x bill, with model routing, context trimming and caching sitting in between. It also puts a question mark over the revenue models of cloud and model vendors — if large customers’ usage growth gets absorbed by falling unit costs, the per-token growth curve is less steep than it appears.

▪ SIGNALUsage up 9.4x with a flat bill is the most valuable engineering result enterprise AI produced in the past year.