Amazon’s engineers have a spending problem, and it starts with two letters: AI. During an internal meeting on July 28, staff laid out a pattern of budget overruns across multiple AI projects that one team described as “catastrophically expensive.”
The most jarring example: a product listing project that exceeded its budget by 860%. The overspend went undetected for five months.
The damage, project by project
The listing project wasn’t an isolated incident. A separate deployment built on Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet racked up $1.8 million in unplanned costs. That project never even shipped.
Other AI initiatives still blew through their budgets. Financial auditing tools ran $541,000 over budget. A logistics improvement project came in $134,000 above plan.
