Bring AI Hype Back Down To Earth

In recent years, tech leaders have accelerated their race to build the most powerful AI first. “Sink or swim,” “AI is not going anywhere,” and “work with it or be replaced” have become mantras in workspaces at Amazon and beyond. 

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. We believe that the all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.

We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene. Here’s why we’re sounding the alarm:

• Amazon is casting aside its climate goals to build AI. We have just a few years to stop disastrous levels of warming. Yet despite committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2040, Amazon’s annual emissions have grown roughly 35% since 2019. The AI race is widening this gap. The company plans to spend $150 billion building new data centers for AI. Many of these will be in drought-stressed regions, where they will consume scarce water, or in locations where their energy demands will force utility companies to keep coal plants online or build new gas plants. Amazon even killed legislation that would have required its data centers to use clean energy. Meanwhile, AWS is helping oil companies drill for more oil and gas. 

• Amazon is forcing us to use AI while investing in a future where it’s easier to discard us. Andy Jassy promised that soon Amazon will be full of AI tools and “agents,” and that he expects to employ fewer humans. He claims our (remaining) jobs will be “even more exciting and fun,” but here’s what we’re actually experiencing: higher expected output and shorter timelines, mandates to build AI tools for wasteful use cases, and massive investment in AI with little investment in career advancement. Our logistics coworkers have been especially impacted by work speedups, surveillance, injuries and burnout. All this, while Amazon is attempting to declare the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ rights, unconstitutional. 

• Amazon is helping build a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people. Amazon, alongside Meta, Microsoft and Google lobbied to ban state regulation on AI for the next ten years; Trump financially disincentivized state regulatory action in his AI Action Plan. Trump demanded an end to “wokeness” in AI; Amazon has scaled back its commitments to DEI and offered the administration a 1 billion dollar coupon for AWS, with a DOGE staffer calling the deal “a foundational piece to help implement President Trump’s AI Action Plan.” The military wants AI technologies at top speed; Amazon has announced a collaboration with an autonomous weapons software company. Trump’s ICE Director wants to run mass deportation “like Prime, but with human beings”; Amazon, a major provider of cloud services to DHS and to Palantir, literally does power mass deportation. Amazon is expanding the surveillance state in other ways, too. It’s making Ring AI-first and re-introducing a tool for police to request footage; it’s using AI to surveil warehouse workers, and, of course, its own customers. Finally, Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and has begun asserting more control over that publication; the other major AI players control mass information ecosystems like Instagram and X. If these collaborations continue, we will be ceding an unbelievable amount of power into the hands of an increasingly authoritarian government and a few companies willing to abandon any principles they claim to have in the race for AI dominance.

All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable. A better future is still very much within reach, but it requires us to get real about the costs of AI and the guardrails we need.

We demand Amazon leadership commit to the following:

1. No AI with dirty energy.
   No more vague promises that “AI will solve the climate crisis.” Amazon must implement a public plan that includes: 1) powering all data centers with 100% additional, local renewable energy, 24/7, 2) ending custom AI solutions for oil & gas companies to drill more oil faster, and 3) publishing a detailed, science-backed glidepath for how it will meet its climate commitments.

2. No AI without employee voices.
   We want ethical AI working groups of non-managers across the company that 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. 

3. No AI for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.
   Amazon sells a huge range of products and services — from physical goods to digital infrastructure to films to medical services. It should not need to be helping surveil civilians in Gaza, collaborating with AI companies that specialize in drone warfare, or supporting a mass deportation machine.

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. 

This is an incredibly consequential moment in history. It’s time for us to step up and spark a conversation about the real benefits and costs of AI. Workers have guided Amazon to a better path before, and we can do it again. The choices we make now, for the planet, for its people and animals, matter more than ever. Let’s make ones we can be proud of.