Instead of pretending to be really busy when the boss walks by, workers these days are trying to make their AI agents look completely swamped.
Driving the news: Some Amazon workers are reportedly using the company’s in-house AI tool to automate unnecessary tasks to artificially inflate their AI usage — metrics that their superiors are closely monitoring, according to the Financial Times.
While Amazon says it doesn’t factor AI usage metrics into its performance evaluations, some employees said they believe their managers are keeping a very close eye on how many tokens they use, a proxy for how many tasks they’re delegating to AI systems.
Why it matters: Even if it means a hefty token bill, top firms are increasingly putting pressure on workers to maximize their AI usage. At companies like Shopify and Meta, managers have started to factor AI use into performance reviews and even have leaderboards tracking which employees are using the most tokens.
One OpenAI engineer ripped through 210 billion tokens in just one week, which is enough text to fill Wikipedia 33 times. All of that usage adds up: A single Anthropic user recently used US$150,000 worth of tokens on Claude Code in a single month.
Even for non-developers, the costs are rising. Last month, Anthropic more than doubled its own estimates for how much an average user spends on tokens for Claude Code.
Our take: This free-wheeling “tokenmaxxing” era won’t last forever. Eventually, companies are going to rein in employees' AI usage, reward those who are most efficient with their tokens, and put a higher emphasis on the quality of the work being produced (something they don’t seem to care about at the moment). As one software industry expert wrote: “It’s becoming a career risk to not use AI at an accelerated pace, regardless of output quality.”—LA
