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Amazon employees are now joining the ranks of those \u201ctokenmaxxing\u201d at their boss\u2019 request, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. Only these Amazon employees are more resistant\u2014they\u2019ve reportedly been running the company\u2019s internal AI tool on trivial tasks to inflate their token counts and climb the leaderboard measuring their usage. <\/p>\n
\u201cTokenmaxxing\u201d is a burgeoning trend at the hyperscalers where employers are rewarding employees for using AI the most, quantified by using tokens. While it isn\u2019t clear that the usage determines much more than brownie points at Amazon, similar behavior was reported other big hyperscalers, like Microsoft and Meta. Notably, all three of these companies are heavily invested in the very tech that they\u2019re encouraging their employees to use. Amazon even reported in their recent earnings that Anthropic\u2019s increased valuation made up nearly half of the company\u2019s profits.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Gil Luria, head of technology research at brokerage D.A. Davidson, said the dynamic concerned him.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat doesn\u2019t sound very healthy,\u201d Luria told Fortune. \u201cYou get the behavior that you create the incentive for. So if you tell people they\u2019ll succeed if they use a resource more, of course they\u2019ll use it more.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Luria clarified that, for him, there isn\u2019t a question that AI tools are very powerful and have the opportunity to make everyone more productive. But the \u201churdle,\u201d so-to-speak, is in diffusion.<\/p>\n
\u201cHumans are rigid in how they do things,\u201d Luria said. \u201cSo if you don\u2019t create an incentive for humans to change their behavior, try something new, most of us won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n
The question is how to incentivize that change without producing gaming, a problem formalized in Goodhart\u2019s Law: \u201cwhen a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.\u201d While Amazon evidently told employees that their \u201ctokenmaxxing\u201d would not be a factor in their performance reviews, multiple employees told the FT that they worried managers watched it anyway. One said there was \u201cso much pressure\u201d to use the tools, and at that, the most.<\/p>\n
This trend doesn\u2019t seem to be confined at just Amazon. At Meta, an employee built an internal leaderboard called \u201cClaudeonomics\u201d that ranked the company\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The dashboard was taken down after The Information\u2019s reporting, but Meta CTO Andrew Boswort has publicly endorsed the underlying logic. He said his best engineer was spending the equivalent of his salary in tokens but, as a result, was\u00a0 \u201c5x to 10x more productive.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s like, this is easy money,\u201d Bosworth told Forbes. \u201cKeep doing it. No limit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The stakes for the hyperscalers are huge. Combined 2026 capital expenditure from Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta is already pushing $700 billion, with some Wall Street projections exceeding $1 trillion for 2027, up significantly from just under $400 billion in 2025. The companies are telling investors that their inference chips are consumed as fast they are deployed, while also engaging in what Luria called \u201ccircular activity\u201d: the same companies invest in their suppliers and customers. He added that dynamic was \u201cpart of the overhang around all of the large technology companies, especially Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Nvidia.\u201d<\/p>\n
Demand for AI is the highest it\u2019s ever been. OpenAI and Anthropic are at a combined run rate of more than $70 billion, he noted, up from roughly zero two years ago. \u201cThose companies actually represent real economic activity,\u201d he said. \u201cThat is consumers and businesses paying for access to their model.\u201d He didn\u2019t believe the hyperscalers themselves were a disproportionate source of that revenue, any more than they\u2019re full of programmers, and programmers are using the software. \u201cBut that\u2019s true for any company.\u201d<\/p>\n
Amazon did not immediately respond to Fortune\u2019s request for comment.\u00a0<\/p>\n
#doesnt #sound #healthy #Amazons #reported #tokenmaxxing #gamify #usage<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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