Even the gazillion-dollar empire that is Amazon is reeling from the costs of letting its employees run loose with AI agents.
The Financial Times reports that staff at the company have identified cases of “catastrophically expensive” cost overruns as it switched over to using AI tools to perform what sound like pretty routine coding tasks.
In one case, Amazon blew $1.8 million by using Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI to match author details with product listings on its namesake ecommerce website. This menial job somehow went 860 percent over the allocated budget. And equally alarming was that it took five months to notice the piles of money being set on fire.
“It’s difficult to figure out how much anything [AI related] costs,” one senior Amazon employee complained to the FT.
