Amazon employees reportedly running internal AI tool on trivial tasks to inflate token counts and climb leaderboards, raising concerns about gaming productivity metrics.

Amazon employees have been using the company's internal AI tool on trivial tasks to inflate their token counts and climb usage leaderboards, the Financial Times reported. Similar behavior has occurred at Microsoft and Meta, where employers reward employees for using AI the most, quantified by tokens.

At Meta, an internal leaderboard called 'Claudeonomics' ranked roughly 85,000 workers by token consumption. In a 30-day window, total usage on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, though neither CEO Mark Zuckerberg nor CTO Andrew Bosworth ranked in the top 250. The dashboard was taken down after The Information's reporting.

Gil Luria, head of technology research at D.A. Davidson, warned: 'You get the behavior that you create the incentive for. So if you tell people they'll succeed if they use a resource more, of course they'll use it more.' This reflects Goodhart's Law: 'when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.' Amazon stated that tokenmaxxing would not be a factor in performance reviews, but multiple employees told the FT they worried managers watched it anyway.