On May 29, the Financial Times reported that Amazon had shut down an internal ranking list used to track employees’ use of AI tools because some employees tried to improve their scores through unnecessary operations, leading to an increase in the company’s computing power costs.
Amazon
Amazon told employees this week that the service, called Kirorank, was offline, according to two people familiar with the matter. The service scores and ranks users based on their active use of AI on Amazon’s Kiro development platform.
Amazon made this decision because Kirorank led some employees to start asking AI agents to complete unnecessary tasks, apparently to improve their rankings on the leaderboard.
According to people familiar with the matter, Amazon Senior Vice President Dave Treadwell told employees earlier this week that the original intention of the ranking was "good", but it ended up causing additional costs to Amazon due to employees "token brushing" (that is, inflating the consumption of AI tokens).
"Please don't use AI for the sake of using AI," he told employees.
"This beta dashboard is not an official or approved tool and has been deprecated," Amazon confirmed in a statement.