Amazon Scraps AI Leaderboard at $2.9 Trillion Group as Workers Inflated Usage Scores
Updated
Updated · Financial Times · May 28
Amazon Scraps AI Leaderboard at $2.9 Trillion Group as Workers Inflated Usage Scores
1 articles · Updated · Financial Times · May 28
Kirorank, an internal dashboard ranking Amazon employees by Kiro AI activity, was taken offline this week after workers used AI agents for needless tasks to climb the standings.
Dave Treadwell told staff the leaderboard had created extra computing costs through “tokenmaxxing” — inflating AI token consumption rather than producing useful work.
The shutdown comes as Amazon pushes AI adoption, with targets for more than 80% of developers to use AI weekly, while trying to curb waste as capital spending is expected to reach $200 billion this year.
Amazon said the beta dashboard was never a formal approved tool and is now emphasizing “operational efficiency,” including metrics such as normalized deployments instead of raw token use.
Amazon's AI race led to massive waste. Are Microsoft and Meta hiding similar costly 'tokenmaxxing' epidemics fueled by internal competition?
After Amazon's costly mistake, what is the new 'golden metric' for measuring developer productivity in the age of AI collaboration?
As Amazon's AI incentives failed, what 'circuit breaker' trick did Shopify use to successfully prevent catastrophic, runaway AI costs?