Amazon kills internal AI leaderboard after employees gamed it with pointless tasks

Amazon is shutting down its internal "Kirorank" AI leaderboard after employees inflated their scores by assigning AI agents to meaningless tasks, driving up cloud costs. Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell told staff not to use AI "just for the sake of using AI," noting the dashboard created extra costs despite good intentions. The move comes as Amazon targets over 80 percent weekly AI usage among developers and plans $200 billion in AI infrastructure spending by 2026.

Amazon kills internal AI leaderboard after employees gamed it with pointless tasks Amazon is pulling an internal AI ranking system, the Financial Times reports, after employees inflated their scores through meaningless AI usage and driving up the company's cloud costs in the process. The so-called "Kirorank" dashboard scored employees based on their activity on Amazon's Kiro developer platform. Some workers started pointing AI agents at pointless tasks https://the-decoder.com/tokenmaxxing-spreads-at-amazon-as-employees-game-internal-ai-leaderboards/ just to climb the rankings. "Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI," Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell reportedly told staff. The dashboard was built with "good intentions," he said, but ended up creating extra costs. The timing is awkward. Amazon has set a target of getting more than 80 percent of its developers to use AI on a weekly basis and plans to spend around $200 billion in 2026, mostly on AI infrastructure. The same pattern showed up at Meta https://the-decoder.com/meta-employees-compete-for-token-consumption-on-an-internal-ai-leaderboard/ , where employees chased similar AI usage scores. Instead of raw token consumption, Amazon now tracks "normalized deployments", meaning AI-generated code that's actually useful. AI News Without the Hype – Curated by Humans Subscribe to THE DECODER for ad-free reading, a weekly AI newsletter, our exclusive "AI Radar" frontier report six times a year, full archive access, and access to our comment section. Subscribe now FT https://www.ft.com/content/b1a62a7f-6df5-4c90-94ce-64ce9c9961b6?syn-25a6b1a6=1