Amazon killed its internal AI leaderboard — and it cost them millions in cloud waste
amazon scrapped 'kirorank' after staff gamed the system with useless ai tasks, driving up cloud costs. the incident highlights the risks of mandating ai adoption without quality metrics.
amazon deactivated an internal ai ranking system called 'kirorank' after financial times reports revealed employees used pointless ai prompts to boost their scores, increasing cloud costs. the dashboard, built to drive engagement with amazon's kiro developer platform, failed to distinguish between meaningful work and token dumping. this move comes as amazon targets 80% weekly developer ai usage and plans $200b in 2026 infrastructure spend. amazon replaced raw usage metrics with 'normalized deployments' to track valuable ai-generated code.