Amazon kills internal AI leaderboard after employees gamed it with pointless tasks

Amazon is pulling an internal AI ranking system, the Financial Times reports, after employees inflated their scores through meaningless AI usage and driving up the company's cloud costs in the process.

The so-called "Kirorank" dashboard scored employees based on their activity on Amazon's Kiro developer platform. Some workers started pointing AI agents at pointless tasks just to climb the rankings.

"Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI," Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell reportedly told staff. The dashboard was built with "good intentions," he said, but ended up creating extra costs.

The timing is awkward. Amazon has set a target of getting more than 80 percent of its developers to use AI on a weekly basis and plans to spend around $200 billion in 2026, mostly on AI infrastructure. The same pattern showed up at Meta, where employees chased similar AI usage scores. Instead of raw token consumption, Amazon now tracks "normalized deployments", meaning AI-generated code that's actually useful.