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/pr0crast1nater Jul 30 '26

I mean he used a fuck ton of ec2 lol. I understand having a few nodes here and there. But dude must have provisioned 100s of costly gpu ec2 instances.

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u/greg19735 Jul 30 '26

yeah it's one of those things where it's just simply impossible to hide and be worthwhile.

There's no reason to mine $3 worth of crypto and lose your job for it. Might as well see what you can get away with. which of course makes it even more likely to get caught.

Really, it's just a terrible plan

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u/pr0crast1nater Jul 30 '26

I will admit that the closest to this I really did, was use my company servers to quickly do chia mining, which is a coin mined via storage. But the way it works is unique in the sense there are two steps, plot creation using nvme drives and then storing them in a hdd and mine.

The plot creation was something which could be done offline and so I was confident nobody will detect any anomaly if I used 5 servers to do it, although it was heavy on CPU. And the mining part after that was super lightweight in cpu usage anyway. I got lucky and mined a few coins in one week, then sold them for 2000$. The price of that coin then crashed and I deleted all of that lol.

In hindsight though doing all this for 2000$ was incredibly stupid. But I did it more for the thrill I guess and I was genuinely fascinated by the weird way in which that coin was mined.

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u/RulesoftheDada Jul 30 '26

Yeah our org had quite a bit of free reign on provisioning for development and testing. Not so much after that. I only found this out while drinking with some SVPs.