Amazon employees are inflating token consumption on internal AI leaderboards to game performance metrics

Amazon employees are using the in-house tool MeshClaw to deliberately create unnecessary AI tasks—triggering code deployments, triaging emails, or interacting with apps like Slack—to artificially inflate their token consumption and climb internal leaderboards.

Amazon has set targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week and began tracking token consumption on internal leaderboards. While officially the numbers do not factor into performance reviews, employees report that managers are monitoring usage, creating what they describe as perverse incentives.

Token consumption is of little use as a metric for measuring actual productivity gains, according to the article. Similar behavior—called 'tokenmaxxing'—has also occurred at Meta.