Amazon accidentally spent $1.8 million on Anthropic Claude Sonnet AI
Amazon just learned the hard way that AI can get expensive, fast.
Over five months, it accidentally blew $1.8 million (860% over its allocated budget) using Anthropic's Claude Sonnet AI to match author details with product listings.
The slip went unnoticed for months, showing how tricky it is to keep tabs on fast-growing AI costs.
Token billing partly behind Amazon overspend
It wasn't just one project: Amazon also spent $541,000 extra on financial auditing tools and another $134,000 trying to speed up deliveries.
These surprise bills are partly thanks to new token-based billing models for AI services, which can rack up charges quickly compared to old-school flat rates.
Amazon used to encourage heavy AI use with an internal leaderboard, but dropped it in May 2026, presumably as the spending hangover started to set in.
A spokesperson called these cases "small, isolated examples," but they come as the company is also laying off thousands while trying to balance innovation with keeping expenses under control.