Amazon drops Kiro AI leaderboard after staff burned through costly tokens

Amazon has discontinued an internal leaderboard that tracked employee use of its Kiro agentic AI development platform after staff created numerous low-value agents that consumed large numbers of tokens to climb the rankings.

Tokens are small chunks of data used when AI models process text or images: inputs are broken into tokens that GPUs then process, and running many agents can quickly multiply those costs.

As AI pricing shifted from flat subscriptions toward pay-by-token models, the company faced steep bills. Amazon had pushed employees to use AI extensively, and some staff went all in on "tokenmaxxing"—creating agents out of spite, fear of redundancy, or to demonstrate productivity.

Amazon said, "The beta dashboard was not a formal or approved tool, and has since been deprecated." The episode underlines how pay-per-token pricing can prompt companies to rethink how AI is used in the workplace.

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