Amazon employees warn AI strategy threatens jobs, climate goals as 14,000 face layoffs

More than 1,000 Amazon employees sign open letter warning the company's AI 'will do staggering damage to democracy, our jobs, and the earth' | Fortune

Amazon employees are sounding the alarm on AI in an open letter addressed to CEO Andy Jassy and the company's senior leadership team. The letter was published last week with signatures from over 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, from Whole Foods cashiers to IT support technicians. It's a fraction of Amazon's workforce, which amounts to about 1.53 million, according to the company's third-quarter earnings release. In it, employees claim the company is "casting aside its climate goals to build AI," forcing them to use the tech while working towards cutting its workforce in favor of AI investments, and helping to build "a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people." "We, the undersigned Amazon employees, have serious concerns about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and our most important years to reverse the climate crisis," the letter's authors wrote. "We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth." The letter pointed out that Amazon's global carbon emissions have increased since 2019, despite its net-zero goal by 2040. Amazon told Fortune in a statement that the claim the company has abandoned its climate commitments is "categorically false and ignores the facts." "Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy. This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects worldwide," Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Fortune in the statement, adding that the company is working to make operations more energy efficient, including data centers. Amazon increased its carbon emissions by 6% last year, in part due to its rapid data center buildout. In November, Amazon announced a plan to invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government customers on AWS, beginning in 2026. The tech giant plans to spend almost $150 billion on data centers over the next 15 years, according to a March 2024 Bloomberg report. In its third-quarter earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts that the company has spent $89.9 billion so far this year, primarily on strengthening Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business. The investment is to support demand for Amazon's AI and core services, as well as tech infrastructure like data centers, Olsavsky added. Meanwhile, Amazon announced in October it would cut around 14,000 corporate jobs, about 4% of its 350,000-person corporate workforce, as part of a broader AI-driven restructuring. Total corporate cuts could reach up to 30,000 jobs, which would be the company's single biggest reduction ever, Reutersreported a day prior to Amazon's announcement. "What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we've seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before," Beth Galetti, Amazon's senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo. Spokesperson Glasser referred Fortune to Galetti's memo in response to AI-related job cuts at the company. Employees wrote in the open letter that those who haven't been laid off are expected to produce more in less time, face mandates to build "wasteful" AI tools even for projects that don't really need them, and witness massive investments being funneled into AI while little is being put towards support for building their careers. The letter also warned that turning Amazon's Ring doorbell camera company into an AI-first technology and re-introducing a tool for police to request footage from its feed "will be ceding an unbelievable amount of power into the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government and a few companies willing to abandon any principles they claim to have in the race for AI dominance." In the letter, signees demand the tech giant detail a public plan to power all data centers with renewable energy, provide a seat at the table to review AI's use and need at an organization level, and pledge that the company's AI won't be used for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation. "The Amazon employees signing this letter believe in building a better world -- not in building bunkers to fall back to," the authors wrote. "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."

We all pay the price for Amazon's AI push

Amazon has announced the layoff of 14,000 corporate employees; it is anticipated that there will be another round of cuts in January. Most media coverage breathlessly echoes comments from Beth Galetti, senior vice president of people experience and technology, that these layoffs stem from new efficiencies born from AI. I was recently let go from Amazon myself, after working there for five years. Was I replaced by AI? Not in the way you might think. No bot is literally doing my old job right now. But the money and power behind the AI industry is using the hype cycle to tighten control over our jobs and our society. The AI tools that engineers like me use in our jobs are nowhere near good enough to replace us; We know because we're the ones who had to babysit the tech every day. Even those of us who are experts at consulting multiple AI agents and feeding them custom information typically report only modest efficiency gains. Often, we spend hours or days fixing AI's mistakes. What is true is that Amazon managers are demanding substantially more work out of every employee. It has always been an intense place, but my former coworkers who have been at the company for a decade say that teams now have more responsibilities with fewer people. We see more frequent "large-scale events" -- for example, AWS outages like the one that rocked the internet this October -- because teams are under pressure to deliver more with less. Non-stop rumors of layoffs instill a corrosive fear into jobs we used to find challenging and satisfying. This fear means that the company can get away with unreasonable expectations of productivity. Not only does Amazon demand we use AI internally, the company is rushing to build data centers because AWS sells the computing power that many other companies' models run on. For example, Palantir runs the mass deportation software used by ICE on Amazon Web Services. Thus, layoffs can be understood both as an attempt to free up cash for more data centers and as a sales strategy, signaling to enterprise customers that they too will be able to lay off huge swaths of their corporate employees -- all they have to do is sign up for AWS's AI tools and services. In this way, Amazon is a bit like the businesses that sold shovels during the gold rush. It is in the company's interest to proclaim loudly and often that there really is a lot of gold out there. Of course, wealthy executives using new tech to seek higher profits and more control over workers isn't anything new. But the degree to which tech CEOs are collaborating with the government to disenfranchise ordinary people and workers, such as through the dismantling of the NLRB, AI-powered surveillance, and aggressive de-regulation of AI? That is new. Beyond the pressure on workers, the mass layoffs, and the worrying collaboration between Big Tech and government, there are other costs to covering the country in a new layer of energy-intensive infrastructure. This moment coincides with our last chance to prevent irreversible climate tipping points. The data centers that Amazon is racing to build require new gas plants and the ongoing use of coal plants previously slated for retirement. Without regulation, this means higher energy bills and water scarcity for everyone, in a future defined by unstable work. It's never been clearer that we can't save ourselves by working harder and hoping to be spared from layoffs. Nor can our good intentions get Amazon and other Big Tech companies back on the more climate-friendly path they assured us they were taking. We experience profound cognitive dissonance when CEOs talk about how AI will create a prosperous future of creativity supported by Universal Basic Income, all while fighting tooth and nail against the taxation that supports even the most basic social safety net. The current trajectory of the tech industry is deeply dystopian. But although there is still human intelligence and decency at these companies, we can remember what evolution tells us humans do best: We work together. Together, we can change that trajectory and help to make sure that machine learning really is a benefit to society, not just to the few. The possibilities are rich, but we need a different path to find the real gold. Amy Wang is a former software engineer at Amazon and a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.

Amazon Employees Say Its AI Strategy Threatens Jobs and the Environment

In the letter, employees claim that Amazon is prioritizing AI over its climate goals and its people. Amazon employees are voicing serious concerns about the company's AI rollout. Over 1,000 Amazon staff members anonymously signed an open letter addressed to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy and the senior leadership team last week. In the letter, employees warned that the company's current AI strategy threatens jobs and the environment. The signatories range from Whole Foods workers to IT staff and represent a small percentage of Amazon's 1.53 million total employees, according to its third-quarter earnings report. More than 3,600 workers outside of Amazon also signed the letter. Related: Amazon CEO Reveals the Real Reason Behind the Company's 14,000 Job Cuts In the open letter, the signatories claim that Amazon is "casting aside its climate goals to build AI" and point to the company's annual emissions growing by 35% since 2019, despite a commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. Amazon strongly rejected the claims and defended its climate and AI investments. Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Fortune in a statement on Tuesday that the letter's claim that the company has put aside its climate goals is "categorically false and ignores the facts." "Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy," Glasser said in a statement. "This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects worldwide." The letter also highlights Jassy's remarks earlier this year that AI would cause Amazon's workforce to shrink "in the next few years." Jassy encouraged Amazon employees to use AI and participate in training on the technology. The employees see Jassy's comments as a statement that the company is "forcing" them to use AI while "investing in a future where it's easier to discard us." Workers are experiencing higher expectations for output and shorter timelines to complete projects, the letter states. Related: Apple Conducted Rare Layoffs Focused on One Specific Team Amazon laid off 14,000 employees in October, one of the largest job cuts in its history, as it made significant investments in AI infrastructure. In a third-quarter earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky said that the company had spent $89.9 billion so far this year on its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services, as well as AI infrastructure like data centers. The open letter demands employee input in AI adoption. The signatories want Amazon to create working groups of non-managers across the company who will help decide how AI-related layoffs or hiring freezes are implemented. Employees would have a formal role in reviewing AI use across the company. "The Amazon employees signing this letter believe in building a better world -- not in building bunkers to fall back to," the letter reads. "We want the promised gains from AI to give everyone more freedom."