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    • Amazon Shuts Down Internal AI Leaderboard to Discourage 'Tokenmaxxing'

    By Any May 30, 2026
    Amazon has shut down an internal leaderboard, reportedly called 'KiroRank,' that ranked employees based on their AI tool usage. Executives made the decision to discourage staff from using AI for unnecessary tasks simply to increase their scores, a practice known as 'tokenmaxxing' that was driving up computing costs.
    Amazon Shuts Down Internal AI Leaderboard to Discourage 'Tokenmaxxing'

    Amazon Shuts Down Internal AI Leaderboard to Discourage ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Amazon has quietly shut down an internal AI leaderboard after discovering it was encouraging employees to game the system, illustrating the growing tension between rapid AI adoption and the rising cost of running it.

    Timeline of the leaderboard and its demise

    The internal tool, known as “KiroRank,” emerged as an employee-built dashboard that tracked and ranked staff by how many AI tokens they used across Amazon systems. It was initially framed as a way to highlight early adopters of generative AI and share best practices.

    As AI use surged in 2026 — driven in part by more powerful, autonomous “agentic” systems — token usage and cloud-compute bills began climbing sharply. According to reporting later summarized by The Verge, the leaderboard prompted some workers to assign AI agents “to carry out needless tasks in an apparent attempt to climb the rankings,” a practice labeled “tokenmaxxing.”

    By late May, senior leaders intervened. Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice president, told staff: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI,” urging them instead to apply it “to help you solve customer problems, to help you solve business problems, to innovate.” The Financial Times reported that he delivered the same message internally as costs rose, telling employees “don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

    Shifting focus: from usage to value

    Following those concerns, Amazon confirmed the KiroRank dashboard had been “deprecated” and stressed it “was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage’s sake.” A company spokesperson said Amazon is now focused on “AI adoption and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains,” while allowing individual teams to decide how to use and track AI tools.

    The move places Amazon among large tech companies recalibrating their AI strategies, seeking measurable business value rather than raw usage as budgets tighten.

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