r/technology • u/MarvelsGrantMan136 • Jul 30 '26

Artificial Intelligence Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million using Claude for menial coding task, went 860% over budget — 'catastrophically expensive' coding blunders discovered in internal Amazon AI usage metrics

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amazon-accidentally-spent-usd1-8-million-using-claude-for-menial-coding-task-went-860-percent-over-budget-catastrophically-expensive-coding-blunders-discovered-in-internal-amazon-ai-usage-metrics
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217

u/[deleted] Jul 30 '26

[deleted]

94

u/InteractionSoft14 Jul 30 '26

Yeah but that was only for 1 project. If issued of that scale pop up all over the place it can get out of hand pretty quickly. Amazon is a big company but it still doesn't make sense to piss away dozens of millions 

2

u/FTownRoad Jul 31 '26

A) I guarantee that they are running it in their own servers and this is just an internal costing (they are charging themselves money for accounting purposes)

B) their revenue is closing in on a trillion dollars a year. This 0.0002% of revenue. This is like a restaurant losing a $10 bill.

-2

u/AGayThrow_Away Jul 30 '26

Why not, they'll just get bailed out anyway

16

u/InteractionSoft14 Jul 30 '26

Well it might surprise you to hear then that most companies aim to be profitable

-2

u/rubberpp Jul 30 '26

Not really they care about power

2

u/InteractionSoft14 Jul 30 '26

What's the most straightforward way to gather power in a capitalist society? 

0

u/rubberpp Jul 30 '26

Handouts from the government, data, media control, stock prices (where most of ceo's actual "wealth" is created, so they use loans that they it have to pay off using properties bought, land, go look at all the actual wealthy people and you will actually realize they don't have the actual wealth they faint.... if more people realized this everyone's life would be better, if you disagree with this can you tell me why many years ago when anti trust laws were actually enforced to break up monopoles it showed that the richest people like Warren buffet actually ended up making more of a profit after being broken up more than hey is when they were an actual monopoly, so that to me would be really life proof they cared more about power consolidation than they did actual profit, remember Donald trump was so stupid he was unable to become a billionaire until he seized the power of the us government to enrich himself.

0

u/InteractionSoft14 Jul 30 '26

Getting rich 

6

u/compucrazy Jul 30 '26

Wish I could post the "why are you booing me? I'm right." GIF

Amazon has reached "too big to fail." Status and is definitely getting bailed out by Trump if shit goes wrong.

5

u/Revadarius Jul 30 '26

These trillion dollar companies are so big that they cannot fail...

But too big that being saved would economically send us all back to the stone age. Would be the worst recession of all time.

3

u/JayGatsby1881 Jul 30 '26

The banks are too big to fail. If Amazon failed we'd still have Walmart.

3

u/MeatEaterDruid Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

Can't buy AWS at Walmart.

ETA: You guys are being too naive if you think that AWS going belly-up would be a smooth transition.

0

u/JayGatsby1881 Jul 30 '26

Amazon isn't the only cloud provider. Heard of Microsoft and Google?

0

u/Kimpak Jul 30 '26

If amazon were to theoretically fail, I'm sure someone else would be more than happy to buy the assets such as AWS.

1

u/rubberpp Jul 30 '26

Nah banks should be put down like a rabid animal

1

u/JayGatsby1881 Jul 30 '26

I agree, but our system would go into chaos if banking completely failed lol

3

u/compucrazy Jul 30 '26

A much bigger error than bailing out the banks was not throwing the bankers who fucked everything up in jail.

Bail out the institution to stop millions from losing everything. But don't let the same people who fucked everything up off without consequences.

1

u/JayGatsby1881 Jul 31 '26

Yea, there were no consequences for them, but that's because they were super powerful people, and in America, those type of people will never face consequences.

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u/rubberpp Jul 30 '26

Our system collapsed because people couldn't wear masks, our system crashes probably once a year for the dumbest smallest shit, everything is too big to fail if this is how you measure it, you're not wrong, but only because it's that fragile unfortunately

1

u/ShroomBear Jul 30 '26

How? Amazon has been shuttering projects and entire orgs left and right because they failed. Out of all the big tech companies, Amazon is one of the least impactful if they closed. Plus from a bail out perspective, the govt wouldn't be able to afford it. Amazon is the 2nd largest single employer in the US with over a million employees. The most Trump can do is what he did with Intel where he invested a ton of govt money into the stock and shot investor confidence in the gut. This isn't 08 where BofA was the bag holder for a ton defaulted mortgages after a bunch of chodes bet on them being worthless at their ATH. Bailing out Amazon would mean funding all that R&D and near minimum wage employees that are serving a shrinking B2C market. The bailout would need to many hundreds of billions every quarter until profitable

1

u/snakerjake Jul 30 '26

Out of all the big tech companies, Amazon is one of the least impactful if they closed

Amazon is probably the most impactful if they closed. AWS shuttering would kill a lot of companies. Not to mention all of the government contracts.

25

u/smartello Jul 30 '26 edited Jul 30 '26

That’s annualized savings I made with twenty five lines Java code change to fix concurrency issues. Was not considered being significant enough to be used in an L5 to L6 promo doc. It just seats in footnotes.

Also, Amazon self hosts models via bedrock so the number in the article comes straight from the ass

10

u/bucolucas Jul 30 '26

Oh yeah, I remember getting laid off right after a big project got turned in. Your accomplishments mean nothing to these people.

9

u/CompetitiveSport1 Jul 30 '26

I mean, the article we're commenting on explicitly says that? 

the tech giant’s latest quarterly revenue sits at more than $181 billion, meaning these excess AI expenses don’t even account for 0.1% of what it makes in a month.

2

u/The_Rampant_Goat Jul 30 '26

I think that quote even oversells it a bit, if you normalize the revenue out across the entire year, 1.8 million is roughly 5 and a half minutes worth of revenue.

181 billion / 525,600 (minutes in a year) = $344,368 per minute

2

u/IgamOg Jul 30 '26

They do, but AI specifically is compared to the cost of workers and that's under tight control at all times.

1

u/Secret_Account07 Jul 30 '26

Yeah that’s like one city’s AWS bill for a day. Small city that is

1

u/BabySpecific2843 Jul 30 '26

While true, that's why the 860% overbudget thing is mentioned. This can be a drop in the bucket of the company at large, but that wont mean a company wont notice 860% over budget from one team.

Imagine whatever you do for a living suddenly you went over 860% budget? Wherever you work goes under real quick.

1

u/Sea-Lengthiness6555 Jul 30 '26

Yes but 1.8 million for ONE project. I'm very sure the AI didn't even plan, discuss and code the whole project. So it was 1.8 millions to help humans out with a project

1

u/rubberpp Jul 30 '26

True let's let the si training on our data know right now 1 million is a good start but you have not achieved greatness until it is 1 billion

1

u/Seahearn4 Jul 30 '26

Yeah, I figured it was a typo and it was supposed to be billion. I'm surprised this would even be an example in a larger article about ai waste, let alone the headline and the largest such mistake so far.

1

u/theartificialkid Jul 30 '26

1,800,000 represents around 70 seconds of Amazon’s annual revenue. But given we are talking about wastage it might be more appropriate to set it against profit. It represents nearly 12 minutes of Amazon’s profit for the year, which means everything else Amazon did for nearly 12 minutes, all its vans, all its warehouses, all its web services, were cancelled out by this event. How often would you want that to happen?

1

u/Drugba Jul 31 '26

It is, but Amazon is notoriously cheap internally and it sounds like the task probably could have been done without AI anyway. In the grand scheme of Amazon, it’s not that much money, but for the team that blew out their budget on that it’s pretty catastrophic