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Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company’s allegedly “all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development” could cause “staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth,” an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday.
Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in.
Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company. A senior engineering manager with over 20 years at Amazon says they signed because they believe a manufactured “race” to build the best AI has empowered executives to trample workers and the environment.
“The current generation of AI has become almost like a drug that companies like Amazon obsess over, use as a cover to lay people off, and use the savings to pay for data centers for AI products no one is paying for,” says the employee, who like others in this story, asked to remain anonymous because they feared retaliation from their bosses.
Amazon, along with other big tech companies, is in the midst of investing billions of dollars to construct new data centers to train and run generative AI systems. This includes tools helping workers write code and consumer-facing services such as Amazon’s shopping chatbot, Rufus. It’s easy to see why Amazon is pursuing AI. Last month, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy announced that Rufus was on track to increase Amazon’s sales by $10 billion annually. It “is continuing to get better and better,” he said.
AI systems demand significant power, which has forced utility companies to turn to coal plants and other carbon-emitting sources of energy to support the data center boom. The open letter demands that Amazon abandon carbon fuel sources at its data centers, bar its AI technologies from being used to carry out surveillance and mass deportation, and stop forcing employees to use AI in their work. “We, the undersigned Amazon employees, 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.
Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser says that the company remains committed to its goal of reaching net-zero carbon emissions by 2040. “We recognize that progress will not always be linear, but we remain focused on serving our customers better, faster, and with fewer emissions,” he says, repeating earlier company statements. Glasser didn’t address employee concerns about internal AI tools or external uses of the technology.
The letter represents a rare instance of tech employee activism during a year rocked by President Donald Trump’s return to power. His administration has rolled back labor protections, climate policies, and AI regulations. The measures have left some workers feeling uneasy about speaking out about what they perceive as unethical conduct by their employers. Many are also concerned about job security as automation threatens entry-level software engineering and marketing roles.
A number of organizations around the world have tried to advocate for a slowdown in AI development. In 2023, hundreds of prominent scientists petitioned the biggest AI companies to pause work on the technology for six months and evaluate potentially catastrophic harms stemming from it. The campaigns have generated scant success, and companies continue to rapidly release new, increasingly powerful AI models.
But despite the challenging political environment, members of the climate justice group at Amazon say they felt they had to try to combat potential harms from AI. Their strategy, in part, is to focus less on longer-term worries about AI that is more capable than humans, in favor of putting more emphasis on consequences they argue must be confronted now. Members say they are not against AI—in fact, they are optimistic about the technology, but want companies to take a more thoughtful approach to how they deploy it.
“It’s not just about what will happen if they succeed in developing superintelligence,” says a decade-long veteran in Amazon’s entertainment business. “What we’re trying to say is, look, the costs we’re paying now aren’t worth it. We are in the few remaining years to avoid catastrophic warming.”
Rallying support for the open letter was more difficult than in previous years, workers say, because Amazon has increasingly restricted employees' ability to solicit people to sign petitions. The majority of signers for the new letter came from reaching out to colleagues outside of work, the organizers tell WIRED.
Orin Starn, an anthropologist at Duke University who spent two years undercover as an Amazon warehouse worker, says the moment is ripe for taking on the giant. “Many people have tired of brazen billionaire excess and a company with nothing more than cosmetic PR concern about climate change, AI, immigrant rights, and the lives of its own workers,” he says.
Slop Factory
Two of the Amazon employees say executives are minimizing problems with the company’s internal AI tools and glossing over how dissatisfied workers are with them.
Some engineers are under pressure to use AI to double their productivity or else risk losing their jobs, according to a software development engineer in Amazon’s cloud computing division. But the engineer says that Amazon’s tools for writing code and technical documentation aren’t good enough to reach such ambitious targets. Another employee calls the AI outputs “slop.”
The open letter calls for Amazon to establish “ethical AI working groups” involving rank-and-file workers who would have a voice in how emerging technologies are used in their job duties. They also want a say in how AI might be used to automate aspects of their roles. Last month, a surge of workers began signing the letter after Amazon announced it would be cutting about 14,000 jobs to better meet the demands of the AI era. Amazon employed nearly 1.58 million people as of September, down from a peak of over 1.6 million at the end of 2021.
The climate justice group intentionally targeted reaching their signature milestone ahead of the Black Friday shopping bonanza, aiming to remind the public about the cost of the technology powering one of the world’s biggest online shopping platforms. The group believes it can have an impact because labor unions, including in nursing, government, and education, have successfully fought to have a say over how AI is used in their fields.
Climate Concerns
The Amazon employee group, which formed in 2018, claims credit for influencing some of the company’s environmental pledges through a series of walkouts, shareholder proposals, and petitions, including one in 2019 that drew over 8,700 employee signatures.
Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson, says climate goals and projects were in the works long before the advocacy group emerged. What no one disputes, however, is the scale of the challenges ahead. The activists note that Amazon’s emissions have grown about 35 percent since 2019, and they want a new detailed plan established to reach the company’s goal of net-zero by 2040.
The activists say what they have received from Amazon recently is uninspiring. One of the employees says that several weeks ago, at a companywide meeting, an executive stated that demand for data centers would grow 10-fold by 2027. The executive went on to tout a new strategy for cutting water usage at the facilities by 9 percent. “That’s such a drop in the bucket,” the worker says. “I would love to talk about the 10 times more energy part and where we are going to get that.”
Glasser, the Amazon spokesperson, says, “Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy.”
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