Amazon AI Cost Overruns Hit Millions
Financial Times Companies digest — July 30, 2026.
Amazon staff identified catastrophically expensive cost overruns from AI deployment mistakes and lack of spending controls. Senior engineers said switching tasks to AI models led to unplanned spending; teams building automated guardrails.
Incidents:
- $1.8mn Claude Sonnet author-matching; 860% overrun; five months to detect
- $541,000 unexpected costs for financial-auditing tools
- $134,000 accidental spending on logistics-speed AI; discovered after two weeks
Context: ~300,000 corporate employees; ~200bn capex planned for 2026 mostly AI/data-center. Token billing from Anthropic/OpenAI driving industry cost spikes. Amazon shut Kiro leaderboard after tokenmaxxing.