Amazon has reportedly shut down its internal leaderboard that tracked employees' use of artificial intelligence, after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased computing costs, according to a Financial Times report.
Employees Inflated AI Usage
The leaderboard, called "KiroRank," scored users of Amazon's Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity. Some employees used AI agents to carry out "needless work" to climb the rankings, leading to higher infrastructure costs due to increased consumption of AI tokens, the units of data processed by AI models.
Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told employees that the leaderboard was created with "good intentions" but resulted in additional costs from "tokenmaxxing"—artificially increasing AI token usage. "Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI," Treadwell said, according to the report.
Amazon's Response
In a statement, Amazon confirmed that "the beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool and has since been deprecated." The company added that the leaderboard "was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work," and that it remains focused on "operational efficiency."
Rising AI Costs a Concern
The incident highlights a growing challenge for tech companies investing heavily in AI. While firms want employees to adopt AI tools, excessive or unnecessary use can increase computing expenses. Amazon has set targets for more than 80% of developers to use AI weekly, and some employees used tools like Kiro and MeshClaw to generate additional AI activity.
AI companies are increasingly shifting to usage-based pricing models, making token consumption a larger cost factor. Amazon is expected to spend about $200 billion on capital expenditure this year, mostly on AI and data center infrastructure.
Amazon has now started focusing on a different metric called "normalized deployments," which measures how often developers use AI to create useful code rather than simply tracking token usage. Treadwell reportedly told staff to focus on building better products instead of increasing AI consumption.
