Amazon has found that artificial intelligence can turn a trivial mistake into a seven-figure one. The company’s own internal metrics show projects running wildly over budget, including one that burned $1.8m before anyone noticed. Senior engineers called the results “catastrophically expensive.”
The cases were laid out at an internal meeting and first reported by the Financial Times. The worst one used Anthropic’s Claude to match author records against product listings on Amazon’s store. It ran 860 per cent over budget, took five months to spot, and the deployment failed anyway.
Two smaller blunders sat alongside it, Tom’s Hardware noted. A financial auditing tool overshot by about $541,000. A system meant to speed up deliveries added $134,000. Each was the kind of error that used to cost almost nothing.
How a cheap mistake becomes a huge bill
The reason sits on the price list. When a person writes buggy code, it throws an error and crashes. When a model does the work, a bad configuration just keeps running and quietly bills you. A retry loop that re-sends the same prompt, or a job pointed at the whole catalogue instead of a sample, produces no crash. It produces an invoice.
