🤖 AI Agents

Amazon Shuts Down Its AI Leaderboard After Employees Game the System — The Rise and Fall of “Tokenmaxxing”

The Story: On Friday, Amazon quietly deprecated “KiroRank,” an internal leaderboard that tracked employee AI token usage. The reason? Workers were “tokenmaxxing” — running pointless tasks through AI agents just to inflate their scores. Senior VP Dave Treadwell’s memo was blunt: “Please don’t use AI just for the sake of using AI.”

Why It Matters: Amazon’s about-face is a cautionary tale for every business racing to adopt AI. The company — which is targeting 80%+ weekly AI usage among developers and plans roughly $200 billion in 2026 capital spending — discovered that measuring AI adoption by token volume creates perverse incentives. Employees optimized for the metric, not the outcome. Amazon is now shifting to “normalized deployments” — measuring useful, merged code rather than raw AI consumption.

The Bigger Picture: “Tokenmaxxing” has become a full-blown workplace trend. Companies are spending hundreds of thousands on AI tokens, ranking employees on leaderboards, and awarding digital badges like “Cache Wizard.” Meta reportedly had employees averaging 281 billion tokens. Legendary investor Michael Burry is calling it a “crazy, rushed, temporary phase” — and he’s shorting Nvidia to prove his conviction. One enterprise client accidentally blew $500 million on Claude AI in a single month because nobody set usage limits.

Your Takeaway: If you’re deploying AI agents in your business, measure outcomes — not token consumption. The companies winning with AI aren’t the ones burning the most compute. They’re the ones asking: Did the AI actually solve the customer problem?

📎 Business Insider | The Week | ABHS

⚡ Agentic AI Identity Sprawl: “50 Autonomous Agents Per Human” Is a Security Disaster Waiting to Happen

Security experts are sounding the alarm: for every human identity in an organization, there could soon be 50 or more AI agents with the same credentials. CertiK CEO Ronghui Gu calls mass agent deployment “a disaster waiting to happen.” The core problem? If a human account is compromised, attackers gain control of every agent under that identity. Okta has responded with a new “blueprint for the secure agentic enterprise” and a generally available product — Okta for AI Agents — that gives AI agents first-class identities with full lifecycle management, logging, and governance. The takeaway for businesses: before deploying AI agents, treat them as identities. Track what they access, review their permissions, and never let an ungoverned agent near critical data.

📎 CRN

⚡ CEO Spends $13K/Month on Codex — And Says It’s Worth Every Penny

Dan Shipper, CEO of Every (backed by Reid Hoffman), revealed he personally spent $13,000 on OpenAI Codex overages last month — “way, way more” than the same period last year. Codex reads his inbox, checks his calendar, proposes meeting times, and drafts responses. His company provides $20/month to all 27 employees and $200/month plans for technical staff, treating AI as a standard operational cost. The key insight: Every moved away from individual AI agents per employee (too much upkeep) toward a smaller number of shared agents like “Claudie” that assist specific teams. Shipper’s advice? “I’m usually very nice, because you never know when they’re going to take over the world.”

📎 Business Insider

📰 AI News

Sam Altman Reverses on the “Jobs Apocalypse”: “I’m Delighted to Be Wrong”

At a Commonwealth Bank event in Sydney on May 26, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman walked back his most famous prediction — that AI would trigger a white-collar jobs apocalypse. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” he said. The data backs him up. Stanford economist Erik Brynjolfsson’s research using ADP payroll records found a 13% decline in employment for workers aged 22-25 in AI-exposed roles — but employment for experienced workers held steady or grew. MIT’s NANDA initiative studied 300 enterprise deployments and found only about 5% delivered rapid revenue gains. The real story: AI is amplifying experienced workers and thinning the entry-level pipeline beneath them — not deleting entire professions. As Forbes put it, “The value of this shift does not settle in the empty chairs the apocalypse imagined. It settles in the workflows of the people still sitting in them.”

📎 Forbes | Yahoo Finance

Tech Layoffs Hit 142,000 in 2026 — While Big Tech Pours $700B Into AI Infrastructure

The paradox of 2026 is staggering. Over 142,000 tech workers have been laid off in the first five months — a 33% increase over 2025 — putting the industry on pace for 370,000 by year-end. Simultaneously, Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Meta have committed a combined $700 billion to capital expenditure, nearly double 2025 levels. Meta alone cut 8,000 jobs (10% of its workforce) on May 20 while CFO Susan Li admitted the company “could keep underestimating compute needs.” Oracle cut roughly 30,000 positions. Stanford HAI data shows software developer employment for workers under 26 dropped 20% since 2024. Altman acknowledged “some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs they would otherwise do.” Deutsche Bank analysts have a term for it: “AI redundancy washing.” California Governor Gavin Newsom signed an executive order directing state agencies to study AI displacement with a 180-day deadline.

📎 Tech Times

Pope Leo XIV Declares AI Must Be “Disarmed” in Historic 42,300-Word Encyclical

In a sweeping document titled Magnifica Humanitas (“Magnificent Humanity”), Pope Leo XIV called for AI to be “disarmed” from uses that enable “domination, exclusion, and death.” Released Monday and amplified Friday with a series of tweets, the encyclical draws explicit parallels to Pope Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum on industrial labor. The Pope condemned AI-driven deepfakes as threats to democracy and compared unregulated AI to “new digital slaveries.” Anthropic co-founder Chris Olah acknowledged that frontier AI labs operate under “conflicting incentives” and warned mass job losses are “a real possibility.” For business leaders, the encyclical signals that AI ethics is no longer a niche concern — it’s now a matter of global moral authority, and the pressure for responsible deployment will only intensify.

📎 The Tribune | Yahoo Finance

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