Amazon discourages employees from ‘tokenmaxxing’ as AI usage drives up costs

Amid rising AI costs, Amazon has sought to discourage its employees from ‘tokenmaxxing’, a trend where workers, mostly in the tech industry, use AI tools as extensively as possible.

The direction is part of a memo that outlines Amazon’s AI usage guidelines for software engineers. Circulated internally in September, the memo was posted to the company’s website on Tuesday, October 27.

Metrics like token usage, the rate of adoption of AI tools, and code changes or reviews remain “deeply flawed” ways of measuring teams or organisations’ AI usage, Amazon said, adding that they can lead to higher costs and too much complexity. However, Amazon stopped short of telling staffers to ignore these metrics altogether.

“Using these input metrics, with care and judgement, as you think about your career and your organization’s performance is appropriate,” the company wrote.In the memo, Amazon has also revised the role of software development engineers and managers at the company in the AI era.

“We’re just seeing the beginning of AI’s effect on software engineering. While we have a vision for what the future looks like, there’s a lot that’s still emerging. We are certain that whatever future best practices are, AI will be at the center of software engineering practice,” it said.

Amazon is far from the first major tech company to look to curb AI token spend. There has been a broader reassessment within companies that until recently encouraged heavy use of AI tools, often treating rising consumption as a proxy for productivity.

While prices of tokens – the units used to measure AI usage – are falling, the cost of completing a task is rising as ​AI firms shift from flat subscriptions to usage-based pricing. That is leaving companies with unpredictable and often higher bills as usage per task becomes harder to estimate.

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Some companies have set limits on employees’ usage of tokens in a bid to slow rising AI bills. Others have switched to cheaper, open-source models for certain tasks.

To be sure, Amazon has not instituted caps on employees’ token usage. However, in May 2026, the company shut down an internal leaderboard after discovering employees were tokenmaxxing to climb the ranks, according to a report by CNBC.

“We believe that it is best to measure, and be measured by, long-term outcomes,” Amazon said in its memo. The company has also discouraged staffers from using AI tools when it does not make sense for a given task.

“If your work does not benefit from current AI tooling, that is a finding, not a failing […] An engineer who can explain where AI does not yet help their work is demonstrating the judgement we are asking for,” it said.

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Amazon CEO Andy Jassy has previously said that AI will “change the scope and speed” of day-to-day work, and potentially shrink its corporate workforce in the next few years through automation, though he’s noted it will also create “other jobs.”

The company let go fewer than 1,000 white-collar workers earlier this month, mostly from its retail unit. The cuts are the ​latest in a series of small reductions since a larger round ⁠of 30,000 job cuts that began in 2025 and continued into ​January this year.