Amazon Warns Engineers Against Tokenmaxxing AI Usage

Amazon employees were running AI agents on meaningless tasks just to climb an unofficial internal leaderboard called Kirorank. That forced the e-commerce giant to kill the ranking system back in May over surging computing costs. Now Amazon is warning software engineers against tokenmaxxing in a new memo published on Tuesday. Terk Terkowitz, a vice president at Worldwide Amazon Stores, wrote that counting tokens and measuring lines of code are deeply flawed ways to gauge productivity. He argued that turning those metrics into targets drives up costs and violates the company principle of frugality. The memo says that if your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding and not a failing. Terkowitz still wants managers to compare the lowest and highest AI users on their teams to check if output is actually increasing. Other firms are seeing similar issues, with one company accidentally spending five hundred million dollars on Claude in a single month.