Amazon shut down an employee-created internal leaderboard called KiroRank that tracked AI token usage, after some staff used it to perform tasks that didn't necessarily solve problems just to climb the ranks. “Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI,” Amazon SVP Dave Treadwell told staff earlier this week, per a Financial Times report. An Amazon spokesperson confirmed the dashboard had been deprecated, said it was an informal tracker built by a group of employees, and said it “was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage's sake.” Amazon does track AI token usage to measure costs but doesn't encourage “tokenmaxxing,” the Silicon Valley trend of measuring AI productivity by sheer usage volume. The move follows similar reconsideration at Uber, where COO Andrew Macdonald recently said AI spending isn't matching productivity gains, after CTO Praveen Neppalli Naga said the company blew through its Claude Code budget for the year by April.
