A series of disclosures this week pointed to growing scrutiny of enterprise AI spending. Microsoft reportedly canceled internal Claude Code licenses after discovering token bills of $500 to $2,000 per engineer per month, while Uber was said to have exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in four months.
The reports come as executives temper earlier predictions about AI's labor impact. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he had been "pretty wrong" about AI's near-term economic effects, and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously warned that AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs, suggested automation may instead expand the work people do.
Taken together, the developments suggest enterprises are entering a discipline phase, weighing per-seat AI costs against measurable returns rather than adopting tools on momentum alone.
Several of the specific figures come from secondary reporting rather than official company statements, so they should be treated as indicative rather than confirmed.