Amazon AI Cost Overruns

Amazon spent 1.8 million dollars trying to get an AI model to match book authors to product listings. The project never shipped. Nobody noticed the spend for five months. That is 860 percent over budget, on a task that sounds almost trivial.

Two smaller versions of the same story showed up in the same internal review. Auditing tool, 541,000 dollars in surprise costs. Logistics project, 134,000 dollars burned before anyone caught it.

Here is the part that gets me. This is not about the AI being bad at its job. It is about nobody having a dashboard that would catch a runaway agent the way finance would catch a runaway AWS bill. Token spend is still the wild west inside a lot of very sophisticated companies.

If Amazon can lose five months of visibility into an AI project, what does that say about the rest of us?