Shortly after Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said that it was “getting harder to justify” spending money on AI as it was “very hard to draw a line” from that spend to useful consumer features (after its CTO said Uber burned its entire annual token budget in four months), Axios’ Madison Mills reported that one company had accidentally spent $500 million in the space of a month on Anthropic’s models after failing to set spend limits. A few days later, Mills would report that other companies were now looking for ways to reduce their AI spend.