A Meta employee independently created a leaderboard that tracked how many tokens—the basic units of data or words that AI models process—the company’s more than 85,000 employees used, The Information reported on Monday. Called “Claudeonomics,” after Anthropic’s AI model, the leaderboard showed the top 250 token users and awarded employees with titles, such as “Token Legend” and “Cache Wizard.”
The leaderboard encouraged “tokenmaxxing,” a growing phenomenon in Silicon Valley which emphasizes token usage as a measure of productivity. While every AI model measures tokens differently, OpenAI estimates that one token is equal to about four characters and a single one-to-two sentence prompt requires about 30 tokens. Token usage can imply if workers are optimizing their prompts, or the number of AI agents they are using.
But now, the fun is over:, Meta took down the internal AI-use leaderboard just two days after the news broke.
The dashboard now reads: “We’ve really enjoyed building this app on Nest for everyone. It was meant to be a fun way for people to look at tokens, but due to data from this dashboard being shared externally, we’ve made the decision to shutter Claudeonomics for now,” reported The Information.
Meta declined to answer Fortune’s questions regarding the dashboard or the move to shut it down, but that doesn’t mean the company is necessarily done tracking tokens. The Information also reported the company has a separate official dashboard for token usage geared toward software engineers, who generally use the most tokens.
Last year, Meta’s Chief People Officer Janelle Gale told employees that “AI-driven impact” would be a “core expectation” in 2026, according to Business Insider. In January, the company overhauled its performance review system to incentivize the highest performers with upwards of a 200% bonus.
Some employees have put AI agents to work for hours to maximize their token usage. Neither Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg nor Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth are in the top 250 token users.
In a 30-day period, total employee usage on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, and the highest-ranked individual user averaged 281 billion tokens. Using the least expensive version of Claude Opus 4.6, which costs $5 for every million tokens, that one user alone could have cost Meta more than $1.4 million.
Incentivizing high token use is becoming the norm in Silicon Valley. OpenAI has an employee leaderboard, and the company’s top power user used 210 billion tokens over one week in March.
Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who has been a leading voice on token budgets, shared his vision for token use at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose in March.
“I could totally imagine in the future every single engineer in our company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to make a few 100,000 a year as their base pay. I’m going to give them probably half of that on top of it as tokens so that they could be amplified 10 times.”
Just days later, Huang said he would be “deeply alarmed” if an engineer he paid $500,000 a year didn’t use at least $250,000 worth of tokens. He did not specify the importance of the 50% measure.
Meta CTO Bosworth said his best engineer is spending the equivalent of his salary in tokens, but he’s “5x to 10x more productive.”
“It’s like, this is easy money,” Bosworth said. “Keep doing it. No limit.”
