Amazon spent $1.8 million on an AI project that never worked — and didn't notice for five months

In one instance, employees were briefed on one episode in which Amazon spent $1.8 million to align author details with listings on their shopping website. Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet AI was used to execute the task but it flopped, the FT reported.

The $1.8 million sum amounted to an 860% cost overrun and took the company five months to detect it, per the FT.

An Amazon spokesperson told Moneywise that the company was “successfully” deploying AI across the company and pushed back against “cherry-picking small, isolated examples where teams are learning from one another and portraying them as business as usual.”

“As with any new technology, we’re experimenting, learning, and improving how we use it, including how we drive cost efficiencies,” the spokesperson said. “Amazon and AWS have built tools and guardrails to help teams monitor and manage AI spending, and we’ll continue to improve them as we learn.”

Amazon isn’t going big on AI ‘on a hunch’

Senior Amazon engineers further briefed employees on two other instances of AI-related overspending, according to the FT. The company was developing financial auditing tools and racked up $541,000 in unexpected spending to accomplish it.

Then engineers leaned on AI to enhance delivery speeds and the task cost $134,000 more than expected, the FT reported. The briefing mentioned that the instances accounted for only a few teams at Amazon, which employs over 300,000 staff at the corporate level. Amazon reported generating $717 billion in revenue in 2025.

Amazon has said it will spend $200 billion on building out data centers, satellites and the equipment to back up its AI ambitions including expanded cloud computing.

“We’re not investing approximately $200 billion in capex in 2026 on a hunch,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in an April letter to shareholders. “AI is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity where the current growth is unprecedented and the future growth even bigger.”