Amazon is looking to minimize “tokenmaxxing.”
The company is shutting down an employee-made leaderboard that tracked AI token use because it encouraged some staff to perform tasks that didn’t necessarily solve problems, just so they could climb the ranks.
“Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice president, told staff earlier this week. “Use AI to help you solve customer problems, to help you solve business problems, to innovate.”
The move, first reported by the Financial Times, is the latest sign that big companies are pivoting from a culture of free-wheeling AI spending amid concerns about ballooning AI budgets that lack the returns to justify them.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the internal leaderboard, called “KiroRank,” had been “deprecated.” The spokesperson said the dashboard was an informal tracker created by a group of employees and “was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage’s sake.”
“We’re focused on AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company, and we’re proud of the way our teams are embracing this technology,” the spokesperson said in a statement.
The spokesperson said that Amazon teams have the freedom to determine how to both use AI tools and track that usage. While the tech giant does track AI token usage to measure costs, it doesn’t encourage “tokenmaxxing,” the Silicon Valley trend of measuring AI productivity by the amount of AI that an employee or company uses.
That trend seems to be falling out of favor.
Uber COO Andrew Macdonald, for instance, recently said the rideshare giant wasn’t seeing productivity and other gains in line with its increased AI spending. Macdonald’s comments came after Uber CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga went viral for saying that by April, the company had already blown through its Claude Code budget for the year.
Tokens are how large language models break down words into numerical inputs and outputs, and are essentially the building blocks of AI chatbots and coding tools. Token usage has risen dramatically in 2026, in part because of the rise of agentic AI, which allows agents to operate with minimal human intervention, potentially for hours on end.
In April, Business Insider reported that Amazon’s retail business was closely tracking how engineers used AI, including how many engineers use AI a month, how frequently AI tools were embedded in workflows, and what results the AI deployments were creating.
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