By Victoria Lorrimar
Publication Date: 2026-05-10 20:07:00
Sometime earlier this year, an employee at tech giant Meta built a system to track how often each employee used artificial intelligence (AI).
Named “Claudeonomics” after the Claude chatbot, the system created a leaderboard ranked by the number of tokens each user exchanged with AI models, with leaders awarded titles such as “Token Legend.” (Tokens are tiny blocks of text, each about four characters long, that language models use to process them.)
Meta isn’t alone in its fascination with “tokenmaxxing”: AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, e-commerce company Shopify, and tech investment firm Sequoia Capital all reportedly monitor AI usage and reward heavy users, some of whom burn billions of tokens in a week.
Boiling a person’s performance down to a single metric can be appealing to management at large companies. But choosing what to measure is not neutral – and if we’re not careful, it can lead to us redefining our vision of what we’re measuring…
