Companies started ranking staff by token spend, and the backlash has a name

Zapier's account of "tokenmaxxing" — treating raw AI usage as evidence of productivity — reports that Meta ran an internal leaderboard called Claudeonomics handing out badges like "Cache Wizard", with its top-ranked user averaging 281 billion tokens at a cost running into the hundreds of thousands of dollars in a single period. It says Amazon shut down a similar board in May 2026 with guidance not to use AI for its own sake, and quotes Nvidia's Jensen Huang saying he would worry about a $500,000 engineer who did not consume $250,000 of tokens a year, alongside Shopify's memo requiring staff to justify not using AI. Zapier argues for measuring time saved, decision quality and customer-facing outcomes instead, and for routing rule-based work to deterministic automation rather than a model.

What it means The figures come from one vendor's reporting on other companies' internal boards, but the underlying question is now a live budgeting argument in real organisations: what number are you actually managing when you manage AI usage?