An Amazon AI project blew through its budget by 860%

Internal Amazon reports reviewed by the Financial Times show cost overruns across the company’s AI deployments. The worst one: a Claude Sonnet rollout built to match author data against product listings ran up a $1.8 million bill, 860% over its allocated budget. Nobody caught it until roughly five months in.

The same documents list an extra $541,000 on a financial audit tool and $134,000 on a logistics system for cutting delivery times.

Against quarterly revenue north of $181 billion, none of those numbers reach even 0.1% of a month’s take. Amazon has already shut down its internal leaderboard ranking its heaviest AI users, citing the rising spend.