Over 1,000 Amazon employees have raised “serious concerns” over the company’s approach to artificial intelligence, warning that it risks “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”
In an open letter addressed to CEO Andy Jassy and the company’s senior leadership, or “S-team,” employees outlined their grievances with Amazon’s “warp-speed” rollout of AI and called for a more considered approach that addressed their demands concerning the climate, worker input and end-use oversight of its AI products.
In response, a spokesperson for Amazon told Newsweek the allegations regarding its climate commitments were “categorically false.”
Why It Matters
Amazon has been one of the AI boom’s most enthusiastic investors and developers, just last week announcing a new investment of up to $50 billion in AI infrastructure to support U.S. government agencies.
However, its recent mass layoff announcement—in which it cited the “transformative” advancements of AI—has heightened existing anxieties that such enthusiasm could drastically reshape the U.S. workforce.
What To Know
As of Monday morning, the letter sent to Amazon’s leadership had been signed by over 1,000 company workers and over 2,400 “solidarity signers,” including employees from major corporations such as Microsoft, Google, Meta and Apple.
“We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene,” the letter said, before listing the main issues with Amazon’s approach to developing and marketing the technology.
The letter warned that the AI race had exacerbated the threat of global warming, saying that in committing billions of dollars toward the construction of energy-intensive data centers, Amazon was “casting aside its climate goals to build AI.”
Employment fears were also central, with the letter detailing how Amazon had increased output expectations in ways that were detrimental to employees, and made “massive investment in AI with little investment in career advancement.”
“Amazon is forcing us to use AI while investing in a future where it’s easier to discard us,” it said.
“I signed the letter because of leadership’s increasing emphasis on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, using AI as justification to push myself and my colleagues to work longer hours and push out more projects on tighter deadlines,” said one senior software engineer, who spoke with The Guardian under the condition of anonymity.
According to the letter, Amazon was also “helping build a more militarized surveillance state.” It referenced the company’s collaborations with defense sector firms and provision of cloud services to the Department of Homeland Security and Palantir.
The letter concludes with a range of demands for the company. These include the implementation of a plan to power all its data centers with clean energy, the creation of employee-run “working groups” to help guide AI policy and the suspension of sales of Amazon’s products and services in ways that support “violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.”
What People Are Saying
The open letter said: “The Amazon employees signing this letter believe in building a better world—not in building bunkers to fall back to. We want the promised gains from AI to give everyone more freedom to play and rest, to spend time with family and friends, to be moved by nature, to create, to feel safe being who we are.”
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Newsweek: “Amazon’s energy strategy is part of our customer obsession. That’s why we’re investing in energy projects and technologies that will make a real, long-lasting impact on our customers, the communities where we operate, and the planet. We recognize that progress will not always be linear, but we remain focused on serving our customers better, faster, and with fewer emissions.”
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a letter to employees in June: “As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done. We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.”
What Happens Next
Amazon has not commented on whether it will engage the employees on any of their demands, though their spokesperson challenged some of the letter’s premises in a statement shared with Newsweek.
“Not only are we the leading data center operator in efficiency, we’re the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five consecutive years with over 600 projects globally,” Glasser said. “We’ve also invested significantly in nuclear energy through existing plants and new SMR technology—these aren’t distractions, they’re concrete actions demonstrating real progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to reach net-zero carbon across our global operations by 2040.”