Amazon kills AI leaderboard after workers gamed token scores

Amazon Shuts Down Internal AI Leaderboard After Employees Gamed the System

Amazon has deprecated an internal dashboard known as “KiroRank” that ranked employees by their consumption of AI tokens after staff began deliberately inflating their usage to climb the rankings — a practice dubbed “tokenmaxxing” — driving up the company’s computing costs.

From Incentive to Excess

The Financial Times reported on Thursday that Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell told employees to stop using AI “just for the sake of using AI” after the leaderboard, designed to encourage adoption of Amazon’s Kiro AI coding tool, instead incentivized wasteful behavior. Workers had been running the tool on trivial or unnecessary tasks simply to boost their token counts and improve their standing on the board.fortune

Amazon confirmed the beta dashboard “was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated,” according to the Financial Times. The company has replaced it with a new “normalised deployments” metric intended to measure meaningful, productive AI use rather than raw consumption.ft

A Broader Industry Problem

The episode at Amazon is not isolated. Fortune reported earlier in May that “tokenmaxxing” had become a trend across major technology companies. At Meta Platforms, an employee built an internal leaderboard called “Claudeonomics” that ranked roughly 85,000 workers by token consumption, with total usage exceeding 60 trillion tokens in a 30-day window before it too was taken down.fortune

Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, told Fortune the dynamic reflected a classic problem: “You get the behavior that you create the incentive for. So if you tell people they’ll succeed if they use a resource more, of course they’ll use it more”.fortune

The Stakes

The financial backdrop makes the waste particularly acute. Combined 2026 capital expenditure from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta is approaching $700 billion, with some Wall Street projections exceeding $1 trillion for 2027. Multiple Amazon employees told the Financial Times that despite assurances the leaderboard would not factor into performance reviews, they felt “so much pressure” to use AI tools as heavily as possible.fortune

The memo scrapping KiroRank, signed by senior AWS and e-commerce executives Peter DeSantis and Dave Treadwell, framed the move as essential to refining how Amazon measures the productivity gains from its AI investments.facebook