Have you ever wondered how productive your coworkers actually are? Meta employees don’t have to guess.
Meta employees created their own leaderboard to track the number of tokens (the basic units of data or words processed by AI models) used by the company’s more than 85,000 employees. information It was reported on Monday. The leaderboard, called “Claudeonomics” after Anthropic’s AI model, displayed the top 250 token users and awarded employees titles such as “Token Legend” and “Cash Wizard.”
Leaderboards encouraged “token maxing,” a growing phenomenon in Silicon Valley that emphasizes the use of tokens as a measure of productivity. Different AI models measure tokens differently, but OpenAI estimates that one token is equivalent to approximately 4 characters, and that a 1-2 sentence prompt requires approximately 30 tokens. Token usage may indicate whether your workers are optimizing prompts or how many AI agents are using them.
But the fun is over. Just two days after this news broke, Meta removed its internal AI-powered leaderboards.
The dashboard says: “We’ve really enjoyed building this app for everyone on Nest. We intended this to be a fun way for people to observe their tokens, but because the data in this dashboard is being shared externally, we’ve decided to close Claudonomics at this time,” it was reported. information.
Meta refused to answer. Fortune’s question While mentioning the dashboard and the move to shut it down doesn’t necessarily mean the company is done tracking the token. information The company also reported that it has a separate official dashboard for token usage aimed at software engineers, who generally use the most tokens.
Last year, Janelle Gale, Meta’s chief human resources officer, told employees that “the impact of AI” would be a “core expectation” in 2026. According to business insider. In January, the company overhauled its performance evaluation system and decided to give bonuses of more than 200% to employees with the best performance.
Some employees have AI agents working for hours to maximize token usage. Neither Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg nor Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth are among the top 250 token users.
In 30 days, the total usage of employees on the dashboard exceeded 60 trillion tokens, and the highest ranked individual users spent an average of 281 billion tokens. Using the cheapest version of Claude Opus 4.6 (costing $5 per million tokens), just one user could cost Meta more than $1.4 million.
Incentivizing the use of high-value tokens is becoming the norm in Silicon Valley. OpenAI has an employee leaderboard, and the company’s top power users spent 210 billion tokens in one week in March.
Last month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, a leading voice on token budgets, shared his vision for token usage at Nvidia’s GTC conference in San Jose in March.
“I can easily imagine that in the future every engineer in the company will need an annual token budget,” he said. “They’re going to be making a few hundred thousand a year in base salary. We’re probably going to give them half of that as a token so they can increase it tenfold.”
Just a few days later, Huang said he would be “very alarmed” if an engineer paid $500,000 a year didn’t spend at least $250,000 worth of tokens. He did not explicitly state the importance of the 50% measure.
Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer, said the best engineers spend the equivalent of their salaries on tokens, but are “5 to 10 times” more productive.
“This is like a quick buck,” Bosworth said. “Keep going. There are no limits.”
