Amazon has reportedly shut down its internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI. According to a Financial Times report, the development comes after Amazon workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs. Citing people familiar with the matter, the report said: “Employees at the $2.9tn group were told this week its “Kirorank” service — which scored users of Amazon’s Kiro developer platform based on their AI activity — had been taken offline”. The incident highlights a growing concern for tech companies spending heavily on AI. Analysts have warned that more AI use can also mean higher costs.
Amazon employees reportedly inflated AI usage
According to the report, some employees used AI agents to carry out “needless work” in an effort to climb the rankings.The leaderboard was designed to encourage AI adoption among workers, but Amazon executives reportedly found that it was leading to higher infrastructure costs because some employees were increasing their use of AI tokens, the units of data processed by AI models.Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, reportedly told employees that the leaderboard had been created with “good intentions.” However, he said the result had been additional costs due to workers “tokenmaxxing” or artificially increasing their AI token usage.“Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” Treadwell told staff, according to the FT report.In a statement to the publication, Amazon confirmed that “the beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated.”
Rising AI costs become a concern for companies
The incident highlights a growing challenge for technology companies investing heavily in AI. While firms want employees to adopt AI tools, excessive or unnecessary use can increase computing expenses.The report noted that Amazon has set targets for more than 80% of developers to use AI each week. Some employees reportedly used tools such as Kiro and MeshClaw to generate additional AI activity and demonstrate adoption.Amazon said the leaderboard “was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work,” adding that the company remains focused on “operational efficiency.”The move also comes as AI companies increasingly shift 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, with most of that investment going toward AI and data centre infrastructure.According to the report, Amazon has now started focusing on a different metric called “normalised 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.
