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Amazon has become the latest tech giant to admit that artificial intelligence all the time probably isn’t the best idea.
The retail giant has reportedly shut down its employee-led AI leaderboard (known as Kirorank), an internal mechanism the company uses to encourage employees to use AI more often.
According to a report by L Financial TimesAmazon’s decision was based on two factors. The first was cost. More companies are using more AI; Additional use, measured by Symbolscausing prices to rise. The second reason is because employees engage in a practice known as tokenmaxxing, where they make AI perform menial tasks to increase the use of tokens so that they score better on the leaderboard. In short, Amazon was spending a lot of money on AI that wasn’t really doing anything.
These two issues reportedly cost Amazon enough money that the company decided to scale back its use of AI by removing the leaderboard and calling for a moratorium on tokenmaxxing.
“One of the internal dashboards, called Kirorank, was recently created by a group of employees who wanted to raise awareness about how AI speeds up work, and was never intended to promote the use of AI just for use’s sake,” an Amazon spokesperson told CNET in an email. “The pilot dashboard was not an official or approved tool, and has been deprecated ever since. We are focused on adopting AI and sharing best practices to celebrate innovation and operational efficiency gains across the company, and we are proud of the way our teams are embracing this technology.”
Clueless may have seen this coming when Amazon’s battle with tokenmaxxing was announced earlier in May. A leaked employee memo from Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vice president, told employees to stop “using AI just for the sake of using AI” in response to employees overusing AI to get to the top of leaderboards. Amazon says it has measured token usage to understand cost and efficiency, but has discouraged the use of these metrics to measure developer productivity.
Companies are retreating from the overuse of artificial intelligence
Amazon is one of many companies that admits it may be using too much artificial intelligence. dead Forcibly closed AI leaderboard run by employees in April after employees participated in tokenmaxxing to compete for “Icon of Legend” status.. In a Rapid response interview Last week, Uber’s chief operating officer, Andrew McDonald, admitted that the ride-sharing company was struggling to justify more AI costs after a viral interview by Praveen Nepali Naga, Uber’s chief technology officer, revealed that the company had exhausted its entire 2026 AI budget in just a quarter.
It is difficult not to classify these decisions as a trend. Microsoft Cancellation has begun CloudCode licenses in early May. according to The Wall Street JournalSalesforce, DoorDash and many other big names have also shifted from using AI for everything to rationing it amid rising costs with lackluster returns.
Despite the decline, the use of generative AI remains at an all-time high. Google announced Gemini has jumped from 480 trillion tokens per month in May 2025 to 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month as of May 2026. One reason is that proxy AI, programming tools, and always-on tools like OpenClaw — all of which have surged in popularity this year — burn far more tokens than basic text prompts and responses from chatbots.
“I would say that (the decline of companies in using AI) is not surprising, but perhaps not slow enough to burst the generative AI bubble that we seem to be living in,” Jackie Reese Ulmer, dean of Ohio University’s College of Business, said in an email. “As companies get better at sorting out applications that provide real value versus using AI just for the sake of using AI, demand will increase.”
This seems to be the rallying cry for these companies. Will McGough, chief investment officer at Prime Capital Financial, said: The Wall Street Journal Ditto, noting that companies are still largely “figuring things out” when it comes to effective use of AI.
Ulmer says the way forward is education, and she encourages her students to learn more about AI applications relevant to their fields, but to always “double down the focus” on “human skills, like critical thinking and communication.”
