The monetary waste aside, and assuming companies using leaderboards and bonus incentives for token use haven't ever heard (!) of Goodhart's Law, the obliviousness to the environmental impact resulting from "tokenmaxxing" is just obscene.

Encouraging and rewarding employees to do maximum environmental damage is positively evil and journalists should call this out in their coverage every single time.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/20/technology/tokenmaxxing-ai-agents.html