Uber spent $3.4B on AI in 2025 and its COO cant trace it to shipped features Uber ClaudeCode [vYShJ4IAyNa]
Uber's COO put the AI productivity translation gap on the record at the major-operator level, and the capital architecture behind the buildout is now being tested against it. Uber spent $3.4 billion on R&D in 2025 and had already exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget by April. Andrew MacDonald's public statement is the first acknowledgment from a major consumer-platform president that token consumption, generated lines of code, and agent invocations are climbing while the features users notice are moving in a different direction. The company is managing the mismatch by slowing engineering headcount growth rather than cutting AI spend. The Financial Stability Board reported this month that AI accounted for more than a third of private credit deals in 2025, up from 17% over the prior five years. A platform with Uber's operational scale publicly naming the translation gap moves it from background assumption to priced risk - one that will eventually land in default rates if the quarters ahead do not close it. The operators willing to say so on the record are setting the calibration the rest of the market will eventually have to price. Subscribe for daily briefings on the shifts reshaping civilization. Watch the full episode here: Get the full story on all of this and much more - read the full edition of today's Century Report here: #UberAISpending #Uber #AndrewMacDonald #AIGovernance #AI #Complete #Lines