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Amazon has removed its internal AI leaderboard after employees began excessively using AI tools to improve rankings. The company warned workers against using AI unnecessarily after operational costs reportedly increased because of heavy usage. Amazon confirmed in a statement that “the beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated”.
Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard that tracked employees’ use of AI tools after workers tried to boost their scores with unnecessary activity that increased the company’s computing costs. Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice-president, told staff earlier this week that the leaderboard had been built with ‘good intentions’.
The decision came after the tool led some workers to assign AI agents, autonomous bots that can take actions on behalf of users to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings.
The leaderboard “was created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work”, Amazon said, adding that the company was focused on “operational efficiency”.
When Amazon started ranking employees based on their AI usage, some workers reportedly began “tokenmaxxing”, which is useful of AI for unnecessary tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the leaderboard.
The behaviour comes amid growing pressure on staff to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 per cent of developers to use AI each week.
"One of the internal dashboards, called KiroRank, was recently created by a group of employees who wanted to drive awareness for how AI can accelerate work and was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage's sake. The beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated. 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," Amazon said in a statement.
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The move highlights how tech groups’ efforts to encourage the use of AI can lead workers to try to game performance measures with pointless activity, increasing infrastructure expenses. Meta employees have similarly sought to boost their position on internal tables by driving up token consumption.
The cloud giant has undertaken sweeping lay-offs to reduce its costs and help finance its vast AI investment. Amazon this year is expected to spend $200 billion in capital expenditure, the vast majority of which will go towards AI and data centre infrastructure.
AI companies such as Anthropic have recently shifted toward consumption-based pricing models instead of flat monthly subscriptions, a move that has reportedly increased costs for some customers.
