More than 1,000 Amazon employees signed an open letter expressing “grave concerns” over AI development, saying the company’s “all costs are justified and warp speed” approach The impact on powerful technologies will harm “democracies, our jobs, and our planet.”
The letter, made public Wednesday and signed anonymously by Amazon employees, comes a month after the company announced plans for mass layoffs in an effort to expand the use of AI in its operations.
Signatories include staff from a variety of professions, including engineers, product managers, and warehouse personnel.
Reflecting widespread AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 employees at companies including Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The letter includes various demands against Amazon regarding workplace and environmental impacts. Employees are calling on the company to provide clean energy to all data centers, ensure that AI-powered products and services do not enable “violence, surveillance, and mass deportation,” and form a working group made up of non-administrators. “They have significant responsibility for organizational-level objectives, how AI is used within the organization, how AI-related layoffs or freezes are implemented, and how collateral impacts of AI use, such as environmental impacts, are mitigated or minimized.”
This letter is advocacy group Amazon employees working towards climate justice. One worker involved in drafting the letter explained that workers were forced to speak out due to negative experiences with the use of AI tools in the workplace, as well as broader environmental concerns about the AI boom. The employee said the staff wanted to advocate for better ways to develop, deploy and use technology.
“I signed this letter because executives are increasingly focusing on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, justifying AI to force themselves and their colleagues to work longer hours, or push more projects with tighter deadlines,” said a senior software engineer who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.
climate change goals
The letter accuses Amazon of “abandoning climate goals to build AI.”
Like other companies in the generative AI race, Amazon is investing heavily in building new data centers to power new tools, which are more resource intensive and require large amounts of power to operate. The company plans to invest $150 billion in data centers over the next 15 years, and just recently announced it would invest $15 billion to build a data center in northern Indiana and at least $3 billion in a data center in Mississippi.
The letter claims that despite Amazon’s 2019 pledge to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, Amazon’s annual emissions have “increased by approximately 35% since 2019,” and warns that much of Amazon’s AI infrastructure investments will be in “places where energy demands force utilities to keep coal programs online or build new gas plants.”
“‘AI’ is being used as a magic word to code an ignorant bet on energy-hungry computer chips that will reduce the power of workers, accumulate more resources, and magically save us from climate change,” said an Amazon customer researcher who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation for speaking out. “It would be great if we could build AI to save the climate! But that’s not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They’re investing in data centers that waste fossil fuel energy for AI designed to monitor, exploit, and extract extra money from their customers, communities, and government agencies.”
In a statement to the Guardian, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser denied the employees’ claims and pointed to the company’s climate change goals. “In addition to being a leading data center operator in terms of efficiency, we have been the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five consecutive years, with more than 600 projects worldwide,” Glasser said. “We have also made significant investments in nuclear energy through our existing plants and new SMR technology. These are not distractions, but concrete actions that demonstrate real progress towards our Climate Pledge commitment to achieve net zero carbon across our global operations by 2040.”
AI that increases productivity
The letter also includes strict demands regarding the role of AI in Amazon’s workplace, which staff say stems from challenges employees are experiencing.
Three Amazon employees who spoke to the Guardian claimed that the company was pressuring them to use AI tools to improve productivity in order to increase output. “I received a message from my direct boss, [from] A software engineer who has worked at Amazon for more than two years, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, talks about how to use AI in coding, writing, and basically everything you do in your day-to-day work, how it can make you more efficient, and how if you don’t actively use AI, you’re going to fall behind and sink or swim. ”
The employee added that just a few weeks ago, her manager told her that she was “expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools,” and expressed concern that the expected production volume that would require fewer people was unsustainable and that “the tools just aren’t making up the difference.”
Customer researchers expressed similar concerns. “I personally feel pressure to use AI in my role, and I hear from many of my colleagues that they are also under the same pressure…”
“All the while, there is no discussion of the direct impact on us as workers, from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output.”
A senior software engineer said the introduction of AI had yielded incomplete results. The most common scenario, he said, is for employees to be forced to implement agent code generation tools. “I recently worked on a project that was just being cleaned up after an advanced engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project,” the employee said. “But none of it worked, and he didn’t understand why. In fact, it would have been easier to start from scratch.”
Amazon did not respond to questions about employee criticism of the workplace regarding its use of AI.
Labor stressed that they are not completely opposed to AI, but want to see it developed sustainably and with input from the people who are building and using it. “I think Amazon is using AI to justify its power grab over local resources like water and energy, but it also justifies its power grab over its own employees, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, speed-up, and implicit threats of termination,” said a senior software engineer. “There is a culture in the workplace of being afraid to openly discuss the shortcomings of AI, and one of the things this letter seeks to accomplish is to show colleagues that many of us feel this way and that another path is possible.”
