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More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development at the company.
They have also called for “ethical AI working groups”, giving employees a voice in how emerging technologies are used across various roles.
The internal advocacy group, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and revealed that over 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined the effort.
Backers within Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff across multiple divisions of the company.
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The letter states that “AI is not going anywhere,” and “work with it or be replaced” have become mantras in workspaces at Amazon and beyond.
The letter expressed that they have sounded the alarm because “Amazon is forcing us to use AI while investing in a future where it’s easier to discard us.”
In turn, the group has demanded the creation of ethical AI working groups made up of non-managers from across the company.
These groups would have significant ownership over org-level goals, including decisions on if and how AI should be used in their teams.
They would also influence whether and how AI-related layoffs or headcount freezes are implemented and help to mitigate the collateral effects of AI use, such as environmental impact.
“We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene,” the letter said.
Jeff Watkins, CTO at CreateFuture, said: “What we’re seeing now is employees shifting from general concerns to requests for formal structures, such as AI working groups, consultations, and the right to veto certain uses of AI in their jobs.
“The Amazon employee group’s open letter is a distillation of all of these concerns, requests for structure and a voice into one place, and I’m sure it will inspire more to follow suit in the world of big tech,” he added.
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Layoff tensions
In addition to advocating for ethical AI working groups, the group also wants input on how AI could be used to automate parts of their jobs.
The letter claims: “[Amazon CEO] Andy Jassy promised that soon Amazon will be full of AI tools and agents, and that he expects to employ fewer humans.”
The letter was sent after Amazon initiated staff reductions in January 2025, citing “unnecessary layers” within its structure. Jassy announced a plan to boost the ratio of individual contributors to managers by at least 15% by the end of Q1 2025.
Instead of executing broad layoffs, Amazon took a nuanced approach. The tech giant cut roughly 14,000 managerial positions – around 13% of their total – through team consolidations and structural reassignments, as confirmed in internal communications.
In November 2025, engineering teams at Amazon were disproportionately affected by layoffs.
Regulatory filings in New York, California, New Jersey, and the company’s home state of Washington revealed that nearly 40% of the more than 4,700 eliminated positions in those states were engineering jobs.
A blog post from Beth Galetti, Amazon’s senior vice president of People Experience and Technology, attributed the layoffs to the company’s increasing focus on AI.
“Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well,” she wrote. “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 (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.”
Watkins added that the reduction in staff due to AI-driven efficiencies has contributed to growing concern in the tech industry, where many companies are mandating the use of AI technologies even as layoffs continue to rise.
“People are seeking explicit commitment that AI tooling won’t be used to cut jobs,” Watkins noted. “If businesses ignore this aspect, then organizations will start to see more disobedience and quiet quitting.”
AI productivity myth
The letter also sets strict requirements for AI in the Amazon workplace, reflecting challenges employees have been facing.
According to the letter, Jassy claimed that jobs will be “even more exciting and fun,” but employees complain of higher expectations, tighter deadlines, AI projects with little purpose, and heavy AI investment over career growth.
“Our logistics coworkers have been especially impacted by work speedups, surveillance, injuries and burnout,” the letter stated.
As reported by WIRED, a software development engineer in Amazon’s cloud computing division claimed that some engineers are under pressure to use AI to double their productivity, or else risk losing their jobs.
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The engineer told WIRED that Amazon’s tools for writing code and technical documentation aren’t sufficient to meet such ambitious targets.
Supporting this concern, only 6% of the 617 engineering leaders surveyed for LeadDev’s Engineering Leadership Report in March 2025 reported a significant productivity boost from AI-assisted tools.“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,” the letter stated.
