{"id":164353,"date":"2025-11-28T14:22:06","date_gmt":"2025-11-28T14:22:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/164353\/"},"modified":"2025-11-28T14:22:06","modified_gmt":"2025-11-28T14:22:06","slug":"more-than-1000-amazon-workers-warn-rapid-ai-rollout-threatens-jobs-and-climate-amazon","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/164353\/","title":{"rendered":"More than 1,000 Amazon workers warn rapid AI rollout threatens jobs and climate | Amazon"},"content":{"rendered":"

More than 1,000 Amazon<\/a> employees have signed an open letter<\/a> expressing \u201cserious concerns\u201d about AI development, saying that the company\u2019s \u201call-costs justified, warp speed\u201d approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to \u201cdemocracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff<\/a> plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.<\/p>\n

Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon<\/a>, 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 \u201cviolence, surveillance and mass deportation\u201d, and form a working group comprised of non-managers \u201cthat 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\u201d.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI signed the letter because of leadership\u2019s 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,\u201d said a senior software engineer, who has been with the company for over a decade, and requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.<\/p>\n

Climate goals<\/p>\n

The letter accuses Amazon of \u201ccasting aside its climate goals to build AI\u201d.<\/p>\n

Like other companies in the generative AI race, Amazon has invested heavily in building new data centers to power new tools \u2013 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<\/a>, and just recently said it will invest $15bn<\/a> to build data centers in northern Indiana and at least $3bn for data centers in Mississippi<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The letter claims that Amazon\u2019s annual emissions have \u201cgrown roughly 35%<\/a> since 2019\u201d, despite the company\u2019s promise<\/a> in 2019 to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It warns many of Amazon\u2019s investments in AI infrastructure will be in \u201clocations where their energy demands will force utility companies to keep coal plans online or build new gas plants\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201c\u2018AI\u2019 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,\u201d said an Amazon customer researcher, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation for speaking out. \u201cIf we can build a climate saving AI \u2013 that\u2019s awesome! But that\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

In a statement to the Guardian, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser pushed back on employees\u2019 claims and pointed toward the company\u2019s climate goals. \u201cNot only are we the leading data center operator in efficiency, we\u2019re the world\u2019s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five consecutive years with over 600 projects globally,\u201d said Glasser. \u201cWe\u2019ve also invested significantly in nuclear energy through existing plants and new SMR technology\u2013these aren\u2019t distractions, they\u2019re concrete actions demonstrating real progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to reach net-zero carbon across our global operations by 2040.\u201d<\/p>\n

AI for productivity<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI\u2019m 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\u2019t get on board and use them, that I\u2019m going to fall behind, that it\u2019s sort of sink or swim,\u201d said a software engineer who has been with Amazon for over two years, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisal.<\/p>\n

The worker added that just weeks ago she was told by her manager that they were \u201cexpected to do twice as much work because of AI tools\u201d, and expressed concern that the output expected demanded with fewer people is unsustainable, and \u201cthe tools are just not making up that gap.\u201d<\/p>\n

The customer researcher echoed similar concerns. \u201cI 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 \u2026\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cAll the while, there\u2019s no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers \u2013 from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output.\u201d<\/p>\n

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: \u201cRecently 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,\u201d said this worker. \u201cBut none of it worked and he didn\u2019t understand why \u2013 starting from scratch would have actually been easier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Amazon did not respond to questions about the staffers\u2019 workplace critiques about AI use.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI 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,\u201d said the senior software engineer. \u201cThere 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.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing \u201cserious concerns\u201d about AI development, saying that…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164354,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,61,60,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-164353","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164353\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164354"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}