Some time earlier this year, an employee at tech giant Meta built a system to track how much each staff member was using artificial intelligence (AI).

Named “Claudeonomics” after the Claude chatbot, the system created a leaderboard ranked by the number of tokens each user was exchanging with AI models, with leaders given titles such as “Token Legend”. (Tokens are tiny chunks of text, each around four characters long, that language models use for processing.)

Meta is not alone in its fascination with “tokenmaxxing”: AI labs OpenAI and Anthropic, e-commerce company Shopify, and tech investment firm Sequoia capital are all reportedly monitoring AI usage and rewarding heavy users, some of whom burn billions of tokens in a week.

Reducing a person’s performance to a single metric can be appealing for management in large corporations. But the choice of what to measure isn’t a neutral one – and if we’re not careful, it can start to rewrite our vision of what we actually value.

The score keeps the score

One of the more full-throated advocates of tokenmaxxing is Jensen Huang, chief executive of chipmaker Nvidia, who envisions a future in which tech employees negotiate high token budgets and consume tokens at rates commensurate with their salaries. Around 80% of those tokens are currently processed via Nvidia’s chips, so Huang’s enthusiasm makes sense.

But is token........

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