More than one thousand Amazon employees have issued a public warning to the company’s leadership, including Andy Jassy and the senior executive team, expressing deep concern over the organisation’s fast and “all costs justified” push into artificial intelligence. The open letter titled “Join 1,000 plus Amazon employees and 2,000 plus solidarity signers demanding a responsible rollout of AI” has been organised by the activist group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice.
The letter has gathered over one thousand and thirty nine signatures from Amazon workers and more than two thousand four hundred and thirty six supporters outside the company. The signatories include engineers, managers, scientists, designers, logistics staff, and marketing professionals. They are urging the company to slow down what they describe as a “warp speed” expansion of AI that they believe places profit and automation ahead of ethics, sustainability, and human wellbeing.
According to the letter, Amazon’s current direction risks harming democratic institutions, speeding up climate damage, and removing jobs due to increasing automation. “We 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 states. Employees are calling for the creation of ethical AI working groups that include non managerial workers. They also want transparency on how AI tools may affect workloads, career development, and working conditions.
The concerns come during a difficult phase for Amazon, which has reportedly cut around fourteen thousand jobs as part of its ongoing cost saving and automation efforts. Andy Jassy has repeatedly emphasised that AI is central to Amazon’s future, with plans for new “AI agents” expected to streamline operations and reduce the need for certain roles. Many employees worry that generative AI could eventually replace large sections of the workforce. One long serving employee said, “It is not just about superintelligence in the future. The costs we are paying now to the planet and to people are already too high.”
Employees are also raising climate related concerns linked to Amazon’s growing data centre footprint. The company’s annual emissions have reportedly increased by thirty five per cent since 2019, despite its goal to reach net zero carbon by 2040. The letter accuses the company of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI”, citing a one hundred and fifty billion dollar plan to build new data centres, many in regions facing water shortages or dependent on fossil fuel based power. Workers also say Amazon has pushed back against clean energy rules for data centres and continues to offer AI tools to oil and gas companies through its cloud services.
Through this letter, Amazon employees aim to start a wider discussion about the social and environmental impact of large scale AI development across the technology sector. They write, “The Amazon employees signing this letter believe in building a better world not in building bunkers to fall back to. 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.”
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