Amazon employees sounded the alarm about artificial intelligence in an open letter to CEO Andy Jassy and the company’s senior leadership team.
The letter, released last week, was signed by more than 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, including Whole Foods cashiers and IT support technicians. This is only a small fraction of the number of Amazon employees, which total about 1.53 million, according to data released in Amazon’s third-quarter earnings report.
In it, employees claim the company is “building AI at the mercy of its climate goals,” forcing them to use the technology while working to cut the workforce in favor of AI investments and helping create “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”
“We, the undersigned Amazon employees, are gravely concerned about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism and in the years most important for us to reverse the climate crisis,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We believe that an all-costs, hyper-speed approach to AI development will cause alarming damage to democracy, our jobs, and our planet.”
The letter noted that Amazon’s global carbon emissions have increased since 2019, despite Amazon setting a goal of achieving net-zero emissions by 2040.
Amazon tells wealth In a statement, the suggestion that the company had abandoned its climate commitments was “completely false and ignores the facts.”
“Amazon is already committed to powering our operations in a more sustainable way and investing in carbon-free energy. This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects around the world,” Amazon spokesman Brad Glasser said wealth In the statement, he added that the company is working to improve operational efficiencies, including in its data centers.
Amazon’s carbon emissions increased 6% last year, in part due to the rapid expansion of its data centers.
In November, Amazon announced plans to invest up to $50 billion starting in 2026 to expand artificial intelligence and supercomputing infrastructure on Amazon Web Services for U.S. government customers. According to a Bloomberg report in March 2024, the technology giant plans to spend nearly $150 billion building data centers over the next 15 years.
On a third-quarter earnings call, Amazon Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky told analysts that the company has spent $89.9 billion so far this year, primarily to strengthen its cloud computing business, Amazon Web Services. Olsavsky added that the investment is to support demand for Amazon’s artificial intelligence and core services, as well as technology infrastructure such as data centers.
Meanwhile, Amazon announced in October that it would cut about 14,000 corporate jobs, or about 4% of its 350,000 corporate workforce, as part of a broader artificial intelligence-driven restructuring. Reuters reported the day before Amazon’s announcement that the total number of layoffs could be as high as 30,000, which would be the largest layoff in the company’s history.
“We need to remember that the world is changing rapidly. This generation of artificial intelligence is the most transformative technology we have seen since the Internet, enabling businesses to innovate faster than ever before,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo.
Spokesperson Glasser mentioned wealth Galetti’s memo in response to the company’s AI-related layoffs.
Those who weren’t laid off were expected to produce more products in less time, were even faced with the task of building “wasteful” AI tools for projects that didn’t really need them, and saw massive investments being poured into AI with little support for their careers, employees wrote in an open letter.
The letter also warns that converting Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera company to AI-first technology and reintroducing tools for police to request footage from its feeds “would cede incredible power to an increasingly authoritarian government and a handful of companies willing to abandon any principles they claim to have in the race for AI dominance.”
In the letter, the signatories ask the tech giant to detail a public plan to power all data centers with renewable energy, provide a seat at the organizational level for reviewing AI use and needs, and commit that the company’s AI will not be used for violence, surveillance or mass evictions.
“The Amazon employees who signed this letter believe in building a better world, not building bunkers to retreat to,” the authors wrote. “We hope the benefits promised by artificial intelligence will give everyone More freedom to play and rest, spend time with family and friends, be moved by nature, create, feel safe and be ourselves. “
This story originally appeared on Fortune.com
