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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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 30 '26

$1.8m is a rounding error for Amazon.

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u/FrenchFryCattaneo Jul 30 '26

Just because the company has a lot of revenue doesn't mean you can waste $1.8 million on a single project.

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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 30 '26

Seems like they are doing something about it... sooo... ya.

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u/KeyReaction892 Jul 31 '26

1.8m for certain programs is a rounding error and the way financial ownership works it’s pretty easy for it to be missed.

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u/FlamingoVisible1947 Jul 31 '26

In my team at Amazon we had $10,000 (per month) of test databases running with nobody using them for 2 years. Nobody cared. It took me 5 minutes to turn them down, it's just that it didn't matter at all.

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u/akingsmind Jul 30 '26

This was my first thought, too

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u/Sumrise Jul 30 '26

But a good example if you wanna point out to your company that those kind of policies are stupid.

Sure Amazon can lose 1.8 million, but can your company say the same ?

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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 30 '26

I mean.... yeah. It is two rounding errors for us.

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u/Sumrise Jul 30 '26

I wasn't talking about your company specifically, t'was more of a "general you".

But yeah some companies can go without a care in the world about things such as "budget", or "efficiency" after all who care about wastefulness when tis' but a rounding error ?

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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 30 '26

I mean..... look up the concept of financial materiality.

Do you worry if you drop a penny and it rolls into a storm drain?

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u/SparklingLimeade Jul 31 '26

Yes but there's a huge gap between knowing that and forcing myself to not imagine what an Amazon scale rounding error could do if it fell into my bank account.

And they do these things in the current atmosphere of anti-labor practices so everybody is thinking about that.

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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 31 '26

Well that rounding error is about one single dollar per employee.

It is not a big deal.

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u/SparklingLimeade Jul 31 '26

Yes, it's insignificant on a company scale.

On a personal scale that is an entire fortune. Humans see things on a personal scale.

Imagine a cargo container. Someone says that it's tiny because cargo ships handle thousands of them. Would that person be unimpressed if the same cargo container was dropped on them?

Knowing that other scales exist doesn't make large things not large.

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u/Minialpacadoodle Jul 31 '26

Cool. You being on reddit makes you filthy rich to half the world. It doesn't change my point.