Amazon employees report “tokenmaxxing” with internal AI tool MeshClaw to meet AI usage pressure

In a new report, employees say Amazon tracks their consumption of ‘AI tokens’—and they’ve been creating unproductive AI agents just to eat them up.

Amazon employees are reportedly using AI for unnecessary tasks to inflate internal usage metrics as companies continue aggressively pushing workplace AI adoption.

Amazon wants workers to be using more and more AI, so workers are just apparently wasting tokens to make it look like they are.

According to Amazon employees, the company is pushing them to incorporate more and more AI in their workflows. What exactly they should be using it for is less clear—leaving the door open for employees to waste AI resources on unnecessary tasks. As detailed in a new report by The Financial Times, Amazon employees are reportedly using the company’s new internal AI tool MeshClaw to create extraneous AI agents, not to increase productivity, but to drive up AI activity. The employees say Amazon is tracking their consumption of AI tokens, incentivizing some of their colleagues to prioritize quantity over quality when it comes to the technology. Amazon employees sound off Several anonymous Amazon employees told The Financial Times that rising AI expectations are changing their workplace for the worse. “There is just so much pressure to use these tools,” one Amazon worker said. “Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.” Though Amazon apparently told employees that their AI usage stats wouldn’t come up in performance evaluations, not all workers are buying it. “Managers are looking at it,” another employee said. “When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it.” The interviewed employees claim that the company has a target of 80% of developers using AI each week and that employees’ token consumption is tracked on an internal leaderboard. But a representative for Amazon says that there is no such company-wide metric for AI usage, nor are there internal leaderboards where employees are measured against each other. Rather, employees are able to view their own AI usage on personal dashboards. MeshClaw, the tool some Amazon employees are using to inflate their AI usage, takes inspiration from OpenClaw, another AI tool that’s infamous for its potential productivity—and for its potential risks. Unlike other AI models, OpenClaw and MeshClaw run locally on users’ own hardware, giving them unprecedented independence. Earlier this year, the director of alignment at Meta Superintelligence Labs went viral when OpenClaw nearly nuked her entire email inbox, proving the potential danger of giving too much access to AI. At Amazon, MeshClaw can be used to deploy code, sort through emails, and engage with apps like Slack. A recent internal memo said that MeshClaw “dreams overnight to consolidate what it learned, monitors your deployments while you’re in meetings and triages your email before you wake up.” It’s a level of autonomy that not all Amazon employees are onboard with. “The default security posture terrifies me,” one employee said. “I’m not about to let it go off and just do its own thing.” Amazon’s AI rationale In a statement to Fast Company, an Amazon spokesperson said that MeshClaw “was built by a small team and it enables thousands of Amazonians to automate repetitive tasks each day, freeing up time for employees to be more strategic and solve bigger customer problems.”  “This is just one example of how we’re empowering teams to experiment with AI and how we’re supporting employees’ adoption of AI tools, and we’re proud of the way our teams are embracing this technology,” the statement continues. And as far as any security concerns, the Amazon spokesperson says they “welcome feedback from employees about their experiences with AI tools because their feedback helps us improve the quality of the tools we provide.” “Our dedicated teams of generative AI and security experts help us meet these commitments through the development of security testing and controls for our AI models and applications,” they said. Amazon isn’t the only company reportedly asking its employees to ramp up their AI usage. At companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, individual employees are processing billions of tokens a week, while managers at Meta and Shopify are factoring workers’ token consumption into their performance reviews. At Google, even non-technical employees are being told to use AI in their workflows.  It all amounts to a culture of so-called “tokenmaxxing,” where employees are encouraged to use AI as much as possible, regardless of the quality of their output.

Amazon employees told use AI or else they started faking tokenmaxxing

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house "MeshClaw" product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens -- units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. "There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee told the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage." Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. "Managers are looking at it," said another current employee. "When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it." Read more of this story at Slashdot.