{"slug": "meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations", "title": "Meta minimizes role of token maxing in employee evaluations", "summary": "Meta Platforms Inc. has told employees it will not use AI adoption dashboards or token counts in annual performance reviews, according to an internal memo from executives Maher Saba and Santosh Janardhan, which directs managers to evaluate output quality, velocity, problem complexity, and scope instead. The policy shift follows a culture of 'token maxing' where engineers competed on AI usage leaderboards, which Meta found diverted them from regular work, and mirrors Amazon's decision to delete a similar leaderboard after employees gamed the system. Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth had earlier stated that 'token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind.'", "body_md": "Meta won’t judge employees by how much they use AI when it comes to annual performance reviews, despite early efforts to drive AI adoption focusing on so-called token maxing.\n\nThe company has told employees that it “will not use AI adoption dashboards or token counts to evaluate impact,” according to [ a report by The Information](https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/exclusive-meta-tells-engineers-ai-token-usage-part-performance-reviews).\n\nThe announcement came in an internal memo from executives Maher Saba and Santosh Janardhan, which said that instead of measuring AI usage, “managers should look at output quality, velocity, problem complexity and scope taken on.”\n\nThis marks a culture change for Meta, where engineers had previously competed to consume the most AI tokens, displaying their scores on a leaderboard. Meta then discovered that its employees were being diverted from regular work because they were using AI to carry out additional tasks to boost their scores.\n\nAmazon had similar results when it implemented a leaderboard to track AI use; it also found that some employees were trying to game the system by using AI to complete unnecessary tasks, [and it has now deleted it](https://www.infoworld.com/article/4178824/amazon-deletes-devs-tokenmaxxing-leaderboard-to-minimize-costs.html).\n\nThe company, however, [does also monitor employees’ use of AI for training purposes](https://www.computerworld.com/article/4161929/meta-to-track-employee-keystrokes-screen-activity-to-train-ai-agents.html), in a program introduced in April, but this is information was not used to measure employee performance.\n\nMeta had already started to look askance at the concept of using AI metrics as a tool to assess employees. Earlier this year, Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bosworth told employees in a memo that “nobody should be using AI tools just for the sake of using them,” adding that “token usage alone is not a measure of impact of any kind.”", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations", "canonical_source": "https://www.infoworld.com/article/4218658/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations.html", "published_at": "2026-09-04 08:38:19+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-04 08:53:34.128935+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Meta Platforms Inc.", "Maher Saba", "Santosh Janardhan", "Andrew Bosworth", "Amazon"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/meta-minimizes-role-of-token-maxing-in-employee-evaluations.jsonld"}}