Too much tokenmaxxing? Amazon stops internal AI ranking

According to a report by the Financial Times (FT), Amazon has abolished an internal ranking system for AI usage called Kirorank. As the business newspaper writes, citing insiders, employees had assigned AI agents to unnecessary tasks to improve their ranking through token consumption. Kiro is the AI development environment that Amazon introduced last July.

Dave Treadwell, Senior Vice President at Amazon, explained to employees, according to the FT report, that the leaderboard had been introduced with "good intentions." However, the result was additional costs for Amazon because employees had artificially inflated their AI token consumption. "Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI," he reportedly said.

“How AI can accelerate work”

Amazon told the FT that the beta dashboard was not an official or approved tool and is no longer supported. The company reportedly said: "The leaderboard was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work."

According to the report, Amazon is now using a different metric called "normalised deployments" to evaluate the use of AI tools internally. Instead of token consumption, the metric measures how regularly developers use AI for meaningful code.

More tokens, more performance?

The phenomenon of employees driving up their token consumption to look better is now referred to as tokenmaxxing. According to reports, this has occurred in recent months, primarily among US tech giants that are particularly pushing AI usage within their workforce. According to the FT, Amazon, for example, has set targets that 80 percent of the company's developers should use AI weekly.

In response, practices have likely spread among employees to generate a lot of activity with Kiro and the Openclaw variant Meshclaw and to demonstrate high AI usage externally. Meta reportedly stopped a similar leaderboard created by employees called "Claudeonomics" in April after reports about it.

AI cost overruns are not only known at Amazon and Meta: According to its own statement, Uber has already used up its token budget for 2026 – and that in the first four months of the year. However, it is unclear whether this has also resulted in an increase in useful functions for customers. "We’re going to have to start talking about token consumption and the associated cost versus headcount," said Uber President Macdonald in the Rapid Response podcast.

(axk)