Amazon employees warn company’s AI ‘will do staggering damage to democracy, our jobs, and the earth’

The letter was published last week with signatures from over 1,000 unnamed Amazon employees, from Whole Foods cashiers to IT support technicians. It’s a fraction of Amazon’s workforce, which amounts to about 1.53 million, according to the company’s third-quarter earnings release.

In it, employees claim the company is “casting aside its climate goals to build AI,” forcing them to use the tech while working towards cutting its workforce in favor of AI investments, and helping to build “a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.”

“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’s authors wrote. “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 pointed out that Amazon’s global carbon emissions have increased since 2019, despite its net-zero goal by 2040.

Amazon told Fortune in a statement that the claim the company has abandoned its climate commitments is “categorically false and ignores the facts.”

“Amazon is already committed to powering our operations even more sustainably and investing in carbon-free energy. This includes supporting two advanced nuclear energy agreements and investing in more than 600 renewable energy projects worldwide,” Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser told Fortune in the statement, adding that the company is working to make operations more energy efficient, including data centers.

Amazon increased its carbon emissions by 6% last year, in part due to its rapid data center buildout.

In November, Amazon announced a plan to invest up to $50 billion to expand AI and supercomputing infrastructure for U.S. government customers on AWS, beginning in 2026. The tech giant plans to spend almost $150 billion on data centers over the next 15 years, according to a March 2024 Bloomberg report.

In its third-quarter earnings call, Amazon CFO Brian Olsavsky told analysts that the company has spent $89.9 billion so far this year, primarily on strengthening Amazon Web Services, its cloud computing business. The investment is to support demand for Amazon’s AI and core services, as well as tech infrastructure like data centers, Olsavsky added.

Meanwhile, Amazon announced in October it would cut around 14,000 corporate jobs, about 4% of its 350,000-person corporate workforce, as part of a broader AI-driven restructuring. Total corporate cuts could reach up to 30,000 jobs, which would be the company’s single biggest reduction ever, Reutersreported a day prior to Amazon’s announcement.

“What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. 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,” Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of people and experience, wrote in the memo.

Spokesperson Glasser referred Fortune to Galetti’s memo in response to AI-related job cuts at the company.

Employees wrote in the open letter that those who haven’t been laid off are expected to produce more in less time, face mandates to build “wasteful” AI tools even for projects that don’t really need them, and witness massive investments being funneled into AI while little is being put towards support for building their careers.

The letter also warned that turning Amazon’s Ring doorbell camera company into an AI-first technology and re-introducing a tool for police to request footage from its feed “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.”

In the letter, signees demand the tech giant detail a public plan to power all data centers with renewable energy, provide a seat at the table to review AI’s use and need at an organization level, and pledge that the company’s AI won’t be used for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.

“The Amazon employees signing this letter believe in building a better world—not in building bunkers to fall back to,” the authors wrote. “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.”