Microsoft and Uber hit an AI budget wall — and that’s good news for Canadians worried about losing their jobs to tech

For months, the narrative has been impossible to ignore: Artificial intelligence (AI) is coming for your job, and it’s only a matter of time until you’re out of work. But two major corporate stumbles this spring tell a more complicated story — and for Canadian workers anxious about their future, it offers something unexpected: a reason to breathe a little easier.

Microsoft — the company that has poured about US$13 billion (C$17.8 billion) into OpenAI and writes up to 30% of its own code using generative AI — reportedly told engineers (1) in a major division to stop using an AI coding tool because the bills got too big. Meanwhile, Uber’s chief technology officer said the company burned through its 2026 budget (2) for Claude Code and Cursor, two leading AI coding tools, in only four months.

The uncomfortable truth is that the technology reshaping the global economy is, right now, too expensive to do…