Amazon CEO Andy Jassy. Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Amazon is looking to minimize " tokenmaxxing ."

The company is shutting down an employee-made leaderboard that tracked AI token use because it encouraged some staff to perform tasks that didn't necessarily solve problems, just so they could climb the ranks.

"Please don't use AI just for the sake of using AI," Dave Treadwell, an Amazon senior vice president, told staff earlier this week. "Use AI to help you solve customer problems, to help you solve business problems, to innovate."

The move, first reported by the Financial Times, is the latest sign that big companies are pivoting from a culture of free-wheeling AI spending amid concerns about ballooning AI budgets that lack the returns to justify them.

An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the internal leaderboard, called "KiroRank," had been "deprecated." The spokesperson said the dashboard was an informal tracker created by a group of employees and "was never intended to promote the…