A growing number of Amazon employees have signed an open letter issuing dire warnings about the company’s AI efforts.
The letter, signed by more than 1,000 employees and released this week, accuses Amazon of pushing AI investments at the expense of the climate and workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a variety of roles within the company, including many software engineers and employees focused on building AI systems.
“We believe that a cost-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to our democracies, our jobs, and our planet,” the letter authors wrote. “We have a responsibility to intervene because we are the workers who develop, train, and use AI.”
In the letter obtained by guardianAmazon employees claim their employer is abandoning its climate commitments in the race to win the AI race. Amazon has pledged to reduce its carbon footprint to net zero by 2040, and cites increasing efficiency with electric delivery vehicles and reducing plastic packaging as part of its efforts to combat climate change.
Despite pledges to reduce carbon emissions, Amazon’s carbon footprint increased last year, a trend tied to pollution from the company’s ubiquitous delivery vehicles and a massive push to build data centers. Resource-intensive data centers like the ones Amazon is spending billions of dollars to build are a hot topic in 2025. Built to fuel the tech giant’s AI ambitions, the building pumps out tons of electricity to keep its servers running and sucks in water to cool all its energy usage.
Data centers are typically located far away from urban hubs, promising rural communities a boom in stable local employment for many of the world’s most valuable companies, but the reality is often less exciting. Despite the large footprint and short bursts of effort during construction, very little manpower is needed to actually keep things running. Considering the downsides, rural areas across the country are starting to reject large-scale AI developments from big tech companies.
AI at any cost
Climate is not the only concern of the Amazon employees who signed the open letter. An anonymous employee group has accused the company of forcing AI on its employees while openly planning to eliminate human workers as quickly as technologically possible. Meanwhile, the letter authors say schedules are getting shorter and production demands are increasing as companies try to squeeze every last ounce of productivity out of their employees.
Amazon announced last month that it would lay off 14,000 employees, a major reduction focused on the company’s workforce. Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people experience and technology, said in a memo to employees that the cuts are aimed at “cutting bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we invest in our biggest bet: the company’s massive investment in AI.”
“The world is changing rapidly,” Galetti wrote. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology since the Internet, enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and entirely new market segments).” Amazon’s AI spending this year exceeds $125 billion, and the company plans to invest even more in artificial intelligence in 2026.
A call for guardrails
The letter also points to Amazon’s extensive lobbying efforts against AI regulation and its role in the proliferation of surveillance and military technologies as key areas of concern. The letter addresses concerns raised by Amazon, calling for it to abandon “dirty energy” in order to recommit to climate change goals, to include non-management employee voices in AI decision-making, and to reject oversight and deportation of its technology.
The letter represents only a fraction of Amazon’s more than 1.55 million employees, but that hasn’t deterred thousands of people at the company from voicing their concerns and potentially putting their jobs at risk. In addition to Amazon’s own employees, about 2,400 people issued their own letters of support, including students and employees of other major technology companies.
“All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable,” the authors of the Amazon letter wrote. “A better future is still within reach, but it requires a real understanding of the costs of AI and the necessary guardrails.”
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