The token bill comes due: Inside the industry scramble to manage AI’s runaway costs

Key points

• Across the industry, companies are starting to balk at the price of AI.
• Uber blew through its entire 2026 AI coding budget by April.
• Microsoft revoked its developers’ Claude Code licenses months after enabling them.
• A Priceline employee told TechCrunch that a routine Cursor contract renewal came back 4-5x more expensive.
• Even though per-token prices have fallen, the push for more AI adoption and increasingly autonomous agents have driven token consumption higher and higher.