Amazon employees are reportedly using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks. According to a report by Financial Times, employees are doing this partly to show managers they are actively using AI tools at work. As per the report, Amazon workers are feeling heavy pressure to show high AI usage after the e-commerce giant set targets and began using how much its staff uses the technology. While Amazon said it will not use these numbers to rate performance, it has become a big worry for Amazon employees. For those unaware, Amazon has rolled out an internal tool called MeshClaw. The tool lets employees build AI agents that can connect to workplace apps and carry out tasks on their behalf. The tool can send emails, manage Slack messages, and handle code work — all automatically. More than three dozen Amazon staff built it, and the company says thousands of employees use it daily to cut down on repetitive work.But some employees have found another use for it. As reported by FT, they are running MeshClaw to generate unnecessary AI activity, purely to increase their “token” count — a measure of how much data the AI processes. Internal leaderboards track this usage across teams, creating what one employee called “perverse incentives.”
Amazon employees raise concerns against MeshClaw
Beyond the pressure to perform, some Amazon employees have raised a different concern: safety. MeshClaw works by being granted permission to act on a user’s behalf — sending messages, making deployments, and taking actions across apps. For some staff, that is a step too far.“The default security posture terrifies me,” one employee told the FT. “I’m not about to let it go off and just do its own thing.”Amazon, in a statement, said it remains “committed to the safe, secure and responsible development and deployment of generative AI.” The company described MeshClaw as a tool that “empowers teams” to experiment with AI in their everyday work.Whether employees feel empowered — or simply watched — is a different question.
The ‘trust gap’ between Amazon and its staff
As mentioned above, Amazon told its workers that token statistics will not be used in performance evaluations. Yet multiple employees told the FT they believe managers are watching the numbers anyway.“Managers are looking at it,” one current employee told the publication. “When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it.”Another employee said: “There is just so much pressure to use these tools. Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage.”The report states that Amazon has since restricted access to team-wide AI usage stats. Now only individual employees and their direct managers can see the data. Managers are also officially discouraged from using token use as a performance measure — but the concern among staff remains.
Not just Amazon
Meta employees have reportedly done something similar, a practice some are calling “tokenmaxxing” — deliberately inflating AI usage stats to rank higher on internal leaderboards.The trend reflects a wider push across Silicon Valley to show that massive AI investments are paying off. Amazon alone is expected to spend $200 billion on capital expenditure this year, with the bulk going toward AI and data center infrastructure. Companies need their staff to actually use AI tools — and they are tracking whether they do.
