More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”
The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.
Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates.
Reflecting broader AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 workers from companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft.
The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment. Staffers are calling on the company to power all its data centers with clean energy, make sure its AI-powered products and services do not enable “violence, surveillance and mass deportation”, and form a working group comprised of non-managers “that will have significant ownership over org-level goals and how or if AI should be used in their orgs, how or if AI-related layoffs or headcount freezes are implemented, and how to mitigate or minimize the collateral effects of AI use, such as environmental impact”.
The letter was organized by employees affiliated with the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. One worker who was involved in drafting the letter explained that workers were compelled to speak out because of negative experiences with using AI tools in the workplace, as well as broader environmental concerns about the AI boom. The staffers, the employee said, wanted to advocate for a better way to develop, deploy and use the technology.
“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 a senior software engineer, who has been with the company for over a decade, and requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.
Climate goals
The letter accuses Amazon of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI”.
Like other companies in the generative AI race, Amazon has invested heavily in building new data centers to power new tools – which are more resource intensive and demand high amounts of electricity to operate. The company plans to spend $150bn on data centers in the next 15 years, and just recently said it will invest $15bn to build data centers in northern Indiana and at least $3bn for data centers in Mississippi.
The letter claims that Amazon’s annual emissions have “grown roughly 35% since 2019”, despite the company’s promise in 2019 to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It warns many of Amazon’s investments in AI infrastructure will be in “locations where their energy demands will force utility companies to keep coal plans online or build new gas plants”.
“‘AI’ is being used as a magic word that is code for less worker power, hoarding of more resources, and making an uninformed gamble on high energy demand computer chips magically saving us from climate change,” said an Amazon customer researcher, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation for speaking out. “If we can build a climate saving AI – that’s awesome! But that’s not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They are investing fossil fuel energy draining data centers for AI that is intended to surveil, exploit, and squeeze every extra cent out of customers, communities, and government agencies.”
In a statement to the Guardian, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser pushed back on employees’ claims and pointed toward the company’s climate goals. “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,” said Glasser. “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.”
AI for productivity
The letter also includes strict demands around the role of AI in the Amazon workplace, demands that, staffers say, arose out of challenges employees are experiencing.
Three Amazon employees who spoke to the Guardian claimed that the company is pressuring them to use AI tools for productivity, in an effort to increase output. “I’m getting messaging from my direct manager and [from] of all the way up the chain, about how I should be using AI for coding, for writing, for basically all of my day-to-day tasks, and that those will make me more efficient, and also that if I don’t get on board and use them, that I’m going to fall behind, that it’s sort of sink or swim,” said a software engineer who has been with Amazon for over two years, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisal.
The worker added that just weeks ago she was told by her manager that they were “expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools”, and expressed concern that the output expected demanded with fewer people is unsustainable, and “the tools are just not making up that gap.”
The customer researcher echoed similar concerns. “I have both personally felt the pressure to use AI in my role, and hear from so many of my colleagues they are under the same pressure …”.
“All the while, there’s no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers – from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output.”
The senior software engineer said that the adoption of AI has had imperfect outcomes. He said that most commonly, workers are pressured to adopt agentic code generation tools: “Recently I worked on a project that was just cleaning up after a high-level engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project,” said this worker. “But none of it worked and he didn’t understand why – starting from scratch would have actually been easier.”
Amazon did not respond to questions about the staffers’ workplace critiques about AI use.
Workers emphasized they are not against AI outright, rather they want it to be developed sustainably and with input from the people building and using it. “I see Amazon using AI to justify a power grab over community resources like water and energy, but also over its own workers, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, work speedups, and implicit threats of layoffs,” said the senior software engineer. “There is a culture of fear around openly discussing the drawbacks of AI at work, and one thing the letter is setting out to accomplish is to show our colleagues that many of us feel this way and that another path is possible.”
