A rising variety of Amazon staff have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings concerning the firm’s dash towards AI.
The letter, signed by greater than 1,000 staff and printed this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments on the expense of the local weather and its human workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a wide selection of roles on the firm, together with many software program engineers, and even staff targeted on constructing AI programs.
“We imagine that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed method to AI growth will do staggering harm to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We’re the employees who develop, practice, and use AI, so we have now a duty to intervene.”
Within the letter obtained by The Guardian, the Amazon staff argue that their employer is throwing out its local weather guarantees within the scramble to win the AI race. Amazon has pledged to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, pointing to efficiencies from electrical supply autos and decreased plastic packaging in its local weather dedication.
Despite its said promise to scale back its carbon footprint, Amazon’s carbon emissions rose final 12 months, a development tied to air pollution from its ubiquitous fleet of supply autos and its main push into knowledge heart building.Useful resource intensive knowledge facilities like those Amazon is pouring billions into constructing out are a scorching matter in 2025. The buildings, constructed to energy tech giants’ AI ambitions, pump in a great deal of electrical energy to maintain servers buzzing and suck up water to chill off all of that vitality use.
Information facilities, often positioned effectively past city hubs, promise rural communities a growth of regular native jobs for most of the world’s most precious corporations, however the actuality is usually much less inspiring. Despite their huge footprint and a brief time period burst of labor throughout building, only a few persons are truly essential to preserve issues up and working. In mild of the downsides, rural communities across the nation are starting to reject massive tech’s massive AI buildout.
AI in any respect prices
Local weather isn’t the one concern among the many Amazon staff who signed onto the open letter. The group of nameless staff accuses the corporate of forcing AI on its workforce whereas brazenly plotting to eliminate human staff as quickly as technologically doable. Within the meantime, the letter’s authors say that timelines are getting shorter and output calls for are on the rise as the corporate tries to squeeze each final drop of productiveness out of its staff.
Final month, Amazon introduced that it will lay off 14,000 staff, an enormous spherical of cuts targeted on its company workforce. In a memo to staff, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of Folks Expertise and Expertise Beth Galetti mentioned that the cuts have been aimed toward “lowering paperwork, eradicating layers, and shifting assets to make sure we’re investing in our largest bets” – specifically the corporate’s huge spending on AI.
“The world is altering shortly,” Galetti wrote. “This era of AI is probably the most transformative expertise we’ve seen because the Web, and it’s enabling corporations to innovate a lot sooner than ever earlier than (in present market segments and altogether new ones).” Amazon’s AI spending this 12 months has topped $125 billion and the corporate plans to speculate that a lot and extra into synthetic intelligence in 2026.
A name for guardrails
The letter additionally factors to Amazon’s main lobbying push in opposition to AI regulation and its position in spreading surveillance and navy expertise as main areas of concern. To handle the troubles it raises, the letter calls on Amazon to desert “soiled vitality” so as to recommit to its local weather targets, loop non-manager worker voices into AI choice making and reject surveillance and deportation functions of its expertise.
The letter solely represents a tiny sliver of Amazon’s greater than 1.55 million staff, however that hasn’t deterred a thousand folks on the firm from voicing their issues, and doubtlessly risking their jobs. Past Amazon’s personal workforce, round 2,400 folks together with college students and staff at different main tech corporations issued their very own letter of help.
“All of that is daunting, however none of it’s inevitable,” the Amazon letter’s authors wrote. “A greater future continues to be very a lot inside attain, however it requires us to get actual concerning the prices of AI and the guardrails we’d like.”
