'Our jobs and the Earth are at risk': 1000-plus Amazon staff raise alarm over AI and data-centre push
Workers across roles — including engineers, product managers, and warehouse associates — signed the letter, which also drew support from more than 2,400 employees at Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
- Nov 30, 2025,
- Updated Nov 30, 2025 9:01 AM IST
More than 1,000 Amazon employees have issued an open call, warning that the firm's "all-costs justified, warp speed" rollout of artificial intelligence risks harming "democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth," The Guardian reported on Friday. The letter captures deepening unease inside one of the world's largest tech companies as it accelerates its AI expansion.
Workers across roles — including engineers, product managers, and warehouse associates — signed the letter, which also drew support from more than 2,400 employees at Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The letter was organised by the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and lays out demands touching both workplace conditions and the environmental footprint of Amazon's AI operations.
Among the key calls, the staffers want Amazon to power all data centers with clean energy, ensure its AI systems do not enable "violence, surveillance and mass deportation", and establish a non-manager working group "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".
One worker involved in drafting the letter said colleagues were responding to negative experiences with Amazon's AI tools and wider concerns about the environmental cost of the technology. A senior software engineer who has worked at Amazon for more than a decade said: "I signed the letter because of leadership’s increasing emphasis on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, using AI as justification to push myself and my colleagues to work longer hours and push out more projects on tighter deadlines."
The letter accuses Amazon of "casting aside its climate goals to build AI." It notes that the company plans to spend $150bn on data centers over the next 15 years, including $15bn in northern Indiana and at least $3bn in Mississippi. It also says Amazon's annual emissions have "grown roughly 35% since 2019," despite a pledge to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, and warns that new AI infrastructure will be located in areas where energy demand could prolong coal or gas use.
An Amazon customer researcher quoted in the letter said: "AI is being used as a magic word that is code for less worker power, hoarding of more resources, and making an uninformed gamble on high energy demand computer chips magically saving us from climate change. If we can build a climate-saving AI – that's awesome! But that's not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They are investing fossil fuel energy draining data centers for AI that is intended to surveil, exploit, and squeeze every extra cent out of customers, communities, and government agencies."
The letter also highlights workplace concerns tied to the internal deployment of AI tools. Three Amazon employees told the Guardian they are being pushed to use AI to raise productivity, with one software engineer saying: "I'm getting messaging from my direct manager and all the way up the chain about how I should be using AI for coding, for writing, for basically all of my day-to-day tasks...and that if I don't get on board and use them, I'm going to fall behind, that it’s sort of sink or swim."
She added that her manager recently said the team was "expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools" — an expectation she described as unrealistic, noting the tools "are just not making up that gap."
The customer researcher said: "I have both personally felt the pressure to use AI in my role, and hear from so many of my colleagues they are under the same pressure...All the while, there's no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers – from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output."
A senior software engineer also said AI adoption has led to flawed outcomes: "Recently, I worked on a project that was just cleaning up after a high-level engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project. But none of it worked and he didn't understand why – starting from scratch would have actually been easier."
Workers stress they are not opposed to AI itself, but want a safer and more democratic approach to building it. The senior software engineer added: "I see Amazon using AI to justify a power grab over community resources like water and energy, but also over its own workers, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, work speedups, and implicit threats of layoffs. There is a culture of fear around openly discussing the drawbacks of AI at work."
More than 1,000 Amazon employees have issued an open call, warning that the firm's "all-costs justified, warp speed" rollout of artificial intelligence risks harming "democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth," The Guardian reported on Friday. The letter captures deepening unease inside one of the world's largest tech companies as it accelerates its AI expansion.
Workers across roles — including engineers, product managers, and warehouse associates — signed the letter, which also drew support from more than 2,400 employees at Meta, Google, Apple, and Microsoft.
The letter was organised by the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice and lays out demands touching both workplace conditions and the environmental footprint of Amazon's AI operations.
Among the key calls, the staffers want Amazon to power all data centers with clean energy, ensure its AI systems do not enable "violence, surveillance and mass deportation", and establish a non-manager working group "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".
One worker involved in drafting the letter said colleagues were responding to negative experiences with Amazon's AI tools and wider concerns about the environmental cost of the technology. A senior software engineer who has worked at Amazon for more than a decade said: "I signed the letter because of leadership’s increasing emphasis on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, using AI as justification to push myself and my colleagues to work longer hours and push out more projects on tighter deadlines."
The letter accuses Amazon of "casting aside its climate goals to build AI." It notes that the company plans to spend $150bn on data centers over the next 15 years, including $15bn in northern Indiana and at least $3bn in Mississippi. It also says Amazon's annual emissions have "grown roughly 35% since 2019," despite a pledge to reach net-zero carbon by 2040, and warns that new AI infrastructure will be located in areas where energy demand could prolong coal or gas use.
An Amazon customer researcher quoted in the letter said: "AI is being used as a magic word that is code for less worker power, hoarding of more resources, and making an uninformed gamble on high energy demand computer chips magically saving us from climate change. If we can build a climate-saving AI – that's awesome! But that's not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They are investing fossil fuel energy draining data centers for AI that is intended to surveil, exploit, and squeeze every extra cent out of customers, communities, and government agencies."
The letter also highlights workplace concerns tied to the internal deployment of AI tools. Three Amazon employees told the Guardian they are being pushed to use AI to raise productivity, with one software engineer saying: "I'm getting messaging from my direct manager and all the way up the chain about how I should be using AI for coding, for writing, for basically all of my day-to-day tasks...and that if I don't get on board and use them, I'm going to fall behind, that it’s sort of sink or swim."
She added that her manager recently said the team was "expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools" — an expectation she described as unrealistic, noting the tools "are just not making up that gap."
The customer researcher said: "I have both personally felt the pressure to use AI in my role, and hear from so many of my colleagues they are under the same pressure...All the while, there's no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers – from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output."
A senior software engineer also said AI adoption has led to flawed outcomes: "Recently, I worked on a project that was just cleaning up after a high-level engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project. But none of it worked and he didn't understand why – starting from scratch would have actually been easier."
Workers stress they are not opposed to AI itself, but want a safer and more democratic approach to building it. The senior software engineer added: "I see Amazon using AI to justify a power grab over community resources like water and energy, but also over its own workers, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, work speedups, and implicit threats of layoffs. There is a culture of fear around openly discussing the drawbacks of AI at work."