- Amazon wants 80% of its developers to be using AI every single week
- The company is even tracking AI token usage via internal leaderboards
- Unwilling workers are using AI where it's not necessary just to inflate figures
Some Amazon employees are reportedly using the company's internal agentic AI platform, MeshClaw, to automate unnecessary or trivial parts of their work simply to boost internal AI usage metrics.
This comes as company workers are being pressured from above to use more AI – Amazon wants four in five of its developers to be using the tech weekly, and has since started tracking AI token consumption on internal leaderboards.
With workers adoption still relatively slow, many have turned to behavior described as 'tokenmaxxing' to artificially inflate their AI usage metrics, the Financial Times has reported.
Amazon workers are pretending to use AI more than they are
MeshClaw is one of the company's internal systems designed to support the adoption of AI, allowing employees to create their own AI agents to navigate software, coding, emails and other regular workflows.
But workers are now said to be optimizing their usage to maximize token counts rather than useful outcomes, ultimately leading to unnecessary AI calls that are increasing Amazon's compute costs without delivering true ROI.
And it's not just Amazon looking to drive AI adoption internally, with Meta, Microsoft and other companies also reportedly gamifying uptake with internal leaderboards.
However, a recent study by engineering analytics firm Jellyfish (via Business Insider) reveals that, while the heaviest AI users consumed around 10x more tokens than average, they only achieved a 2x increase in productivity.
Conversely, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in an interview with the All-In Podcast he would be "deeply alarmed" if workers like software engineers or AI researchers didn't use half their annual salary's worth of AI tokens annually – that's $250,000 in tokens for a $500,000 worker.
