Amazon employees have reportedly been running the company’s internal AI tool on trivial tasks to inflate their token counts and climb a leaderboard measuring usage, according to the Financial Times. The trend, known as “tokenmaxxing,” is also happening at Microsoft and Meta, where an internal leaderboard called “Claudeonomics” ranked 85,000 workers by token consumption with total usage exceeding 60 trillion tokens in 30 days before being taken down. Analyst Gil Luria of D.A. Davidson told Fortune that “doesn’t sound very healthy” and warned that creating incentives based on AI usage produces gaming behavior, while combined 2026 capital expenditure from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta is pushing $700B as the companies pour money into AI infrastructure.
