Amazon Employees Inflate AI Tool Usage for Leaderboards

Amazon employees are inflating their usage of an internal artificial intelligence tool to meet informal pressures and climb company leaderboards, according to multiple workers familiar with the matter.

The practice involves MeshClaw, an in-house platform inspired by the open-source OpenClaw, which enables staff to run AI agents locally on their hardware. These agents can automate tasks such as initiating code deployments, triaging emails and interacting with Slack. In recent weeks, as Amazon has expanded deployment of MeshClaw across teams, some employees have programmed the tool to perform nonessential activities, boosting their consumption of AI tokens, or units of data processed by models. Workers described this as "tokenmaxxing," a competitive effort to maximize token use and impress managers amid internal tracking on leaderboards, or dashboards as Amazon calls them.

The behavior stems from targets set earlier this year requiring more than 80 percent of developers to engage with AI tools each week. Amazon has stated that token statistics will not factor into individual performance evaluations and that managers are discouraged from using them as metrics. The company tracks...