‘That doesn’t sound very healthy’: Amazon’s reported tokenmaxxing might gamify AI usage, analyst warns

Amazon employees are now joining the ranks of those “tokenmaxxing” at their boss’ request, the Financial Times reported Tuesday. Only these Amazon employees are more resistant—they’ve reportedly been running the company’s internal AI tool on trivial tasks to inflate their token counts and climb the leaderboard measuring their usage. “Tokenmaxxing” is a burgeoning trend at the hyperscalers where employers are rewarding employees for using AI the most, quantified by using tokens. While it isn’t 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’re encouraging their employees to use. Amazon even reported in their recent earnings that Anthropic’s increased valuation made up nearly half of the company’s profits. Gil Luria, head of technology research at brokerage D.A. Davidson, said the dynamic concerned him. “That doesn’t sound very healthy,” Luria told Fortune. “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.” Luria clarified that, for him, there isn’t a question that AI tools are very powerful and have the opportunity to make everyone more productive. But the “hurdle,” so-to-speak, is in diffusion.“Humans are rigid in how they do things,” Luria said. “So if you don’t create an incentive for humans to change their behavior, try something new, most of us won’t.” The question is how to incentivize that change without producing gaming, a problem formalized in Goodhart’s Law: “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” While Amazon evidently told employees that their “tokenmaxxing” would not be a factor in their performance reviews, multiple employees told the FT that they worried managers watched