Amazon Restricts AI Use Amid Internal Efficiency Concerns Following Token Board Closure

Amazon Deprecates Employee-Built AI Ranking System Amid Growing Scrutiny of AI Spending

Amazon has shut down an employee-created artificial intelligence leaderboard, known as "KiroRank," after concluding it was pushing staff to inflate AI activity rather than solve genuine business problems. The move comes as major corporations across Silicon Valley begin reassessing the true value of runaway AI spending.

The internal ranking tool was created informally by a group of Amazon employees and had been tracking AI token usage as a proxy for productivity. However, concerns arose that it was incentivizing a behavior now widely known in Silicon Valley as "tokenmaxxing": the practice of measuring AI-driven output by sheer volume of consumption rather than by any meaningful outcome.

Amazon's Senior Vice President, Dave Treadwell, addressed employees directly, warning them against using AI merely to improve their standing on a dashboard rather than to address real business challenges. "Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI," Treadwell told staff. "Use AI to help you solve customer problems, to help you solve business problems, to innovate."

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Amazon confirmed that KiroRank had been "deprecated," clarifying that the dashboard was an informal initiative and "was never intended to promote the use of AI for usage's sake." While Amazon has not banned AI productivity tracking altogether, individual teams across the organization retain the freedom to determine how they deploy AI tools and how they measure that usage internally.

In April, Amazon's retail division was reported to be closely monitoring how engineers across the business engaged with AI tools, including monthly adoption rates, how deeply AI capabilities had been embedded into workflows, and what concrete results those deployments were generating. The focus, in other words, was on outcomes rather than raw activity.

Amazon's move comes at a moment of broader recalibration across the technology industry. After years of largely unchecked enthusiasm for AI investment, some of the world's most prominent companies are beginning to question whether the financial outlay is generating proportional productivity gains. Uber's chief operating officer, Andrew Macdonald, recently acknowledged that the rideshare giant was not seeing productivity and other gains in line with its increased AI spending.

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Together, these disclosures suggest that the era of free-wheeling AI investment, justified by anticipated future returns, is beginning to give way to harder scrutiny of what the spending is actually producing. Tokens are the fundamental units through which large language models process and generate language, serving as the building blocks of AI chatbots, coding assistants, and automated agents. Token usage across the industry has climbed sharply throughout 2026, driven in significant part by the proliferation of agentic AI systems that can operate autonomously, with minimal human oversight, for extended periods.

Amazon's decision to shut down KiroRank is a signal that at least one of the largest technology companies in the world is no longer comfortable with the trade-off between AI usage and value.