Four months of Claude Code — that’s all it took for Uber to burn through its entire annual budget for AI. Token after token, engineers embraced the platform with few control mechanisms tying costs to outcomes. The result was a budget runaway and a clear case study in how limited oversight snowballs into an AI blowout. This is a phenomenon I like to call “shadow tokens” — AI credits paid for by the company but largely invisible to decision-makers. By 2028, Gartner predicts that AI coding costs (driven by this kind of ungoverned consumption) will be as much per developer as the salary companies pay that person.