Amazon workers warn ‘warp-speed’ AI push threatens democracy and the planet
A growing number of Amazon employees have signed onto an open letter issuing some dire warnings about the company’s sprint toward AI.
The letter, signed by more than 1,000 workers and published this week, calls out Amazon for pushing its AI investments at the expense of the climate and its human workforce. The letter’s supporters come from a wide array of roles at the company, including many software engineers, and even employees focused on building AI systems.
“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,” the letter’s authors wrote. “We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene.”
In the letter obtained by The Guardian, the Amazon employees argue that their employer is throwing out its climate promises in the scramble to win the AI race. Amazon has pledged to reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2040, pointing to efficiencies from electric delivery vehicles and reduced plastic packaging in its climate commitment.
In spite of its stated promise to reduce its carbon footprint, Amazon’s carbon emissions rose last year, a trend tied to pollution from its ubiquitous fleet of delivery vehicles and its major push into data center construction.Resource intensive data centers like the ones Amazon is pouring billions into building out are a hot topic in 2025. The buildings, built to power tech giants’ AI ambitions, pump in loads of electricity to keep servers humming and suck up water to cool off all of that energy use.
Data centers, usually placed well beyond urban hubs, promise rural communities a boom of steady local jobs for many of the world’s most valuable companies, but the reality is often less inspiring. In spite of their massive footprint and a short term burst of work during construction, very few people are actually necessary to keep things up and running. In light of the downsides, rural communities around the country are beginning to reject big tech’s big AI buildout.
AI at all costs
Climate isn’t the only concern among the Amazon workers who signed onto the open letter. The group of anonymous employees accuses the company of forcing AI on its workforce while openly plotting to get rid of human workers as soon as technologically possible. In the meantime, the letter’s authors say that timelines are getting shorter and output demands are on the rise as the company tries to squeeze every last drop of productivity out of its employees.
Last month, Amazon announced that it would lay off 14,000 employees, a massive round of cuts focused on its corporate workforce. In a memo to employees, Amazon’s Senior Vice President of People Experience and Technology Beth Galetti said that the cuts were aimed at “reducing bureaucracy, removing layers, and shifting resources to ensure we’re investing in our biggest bets” – namely the company’s enormous spending on AI.
“The world is changing quickly,” Galetti wrote. “This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it’s enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones).” Amazon’s AI spending this year has topped $125 billion and the company plans to invest that much and more into artificial intelligence in 2026.
A call for guardrails
The letter also points to Amazon’s major lobbying push against AI regulation and its role in spreading surveillance and military technology as major areas of concern. To address the worries it raises, the letter calls on Amazon to abandon “dirty energy” in order to recommit to its climate goals, loop non-manager employee voices into AI decision making and reject surveillance and deportation applications of its technology.
The letter only represents a tiny sliver of Amazon’s more than 1.55 million employees, but that hasn’t deterred a thousand people at the company from voicing their concerns, and potentially risking their jobs. Beyond Amazon’s own workforce, around 2,400 people including students and workers at other major tech companies issued their own letter of support.
“All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable,” the Amazon letter’s authors wrote. “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.”
