Amazon Employees Are 'Tokenmaxxing' Due To Pressure To Use AI Tools (arstechnica.com)
- Reference: 0183198455
- News link: https://slashdot.org/story/26/05/12/1724231/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools
- Source link: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/
> Amazon employees are [1]using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house "MeshClaw" product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens -- units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards.
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> "There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee told the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage." Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. "Managers are looking at it," said another current employee. "When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it."
[1] https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/05/amazon-employees-are-tokenmaxxing-due-to-pressure-to-use-ai-tools/
Backwards from what they think? (Score:2)
Given that big companies have already made it clear that they think AI will let them do the same work with fewer people, and given that using AI costs the company a lot in terms of compute resources, it seems intuitively obvious that the only reason execs would want to encourage more AI use is to find out what jobs can easily have their headcount reduced by more use of AI.
The people using the most tokens are the ones for whom more of their jobs can be most easily automated. This is not, IMO, a positive si
Re: (Score:2)
"It seemed like such a _good idea_ at the time!"
And... thus... the Great Depression V.2 begins... companies still sell products, companies still make products, nobody can afford to buy the products.
This costs money (Score:1)
I moderately to heavily use AI for my work because it is capable of speeding up routine time-consuming tasks. I do that so I can use my time more effectively on other productive tasks. However, I did rough calculation and it costs about 4$/hour in tokens for that. That is subsidized costs where LLMs are offered at a loss to capture market share. True costs are easily double that. This is not trivial cost if everyone in a company starts doing that.
That which is measured (Score:3)
That which is measured is improved.
You want more token usage? You got it!
"internal leader boards" (Score:2)
Those kinds of shenanigans are a good example of why I remain self employed to this day. You can keep your Office Space style bullshit. Modern corporations, especially aggressive companies like Amazon, have gamified the workplace into just sucking every last ounce of energy out of their 'human resources'. You're more a slave and less an employee every year.
Yo dawg, I heard you like automation. (Score:2)
So, they're using an AI tool to automate "looking like" they're using AI? It's AI all the way down? AI driving AI? Maybe Amazon can luck out and just have a whole bunch of AI systems driving other AI systems without needing any employees? AND THE FANTASY CAN BECOME REAL!
That's not very hard (Score:2)
Particularly if you have a system that supports multi-agent teams, you can just spin up a bunch of them, create a harness that makes them talk to each other in real-time and tell them what you want to do. It's not hard to do that.
For companies like Amazon that probably makes sense. They want to prolong the bubble of "Frontier model" companies. For the rest of the world, price hikes will eventually make them creative. My prediction is that we might see something a bit more clever than current coding agents t
Re: So basically the AI equivalent... (Score:2)
Nah, this is more like working at a company that measures your productivity in LoC typed. People making shit long-winded just to game the numbers.
Can't wait to hear about some big incident because someone automated something unnecessarily to increase their token usage. It will be literally the fault of these policies regarding AI adoption.