The Amazon Employees for Climate Justice are asking Amazon to say
- No AI with dirty energy.
- No AI without employee voices.
- No AI for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.
I just signed their open letter. You should too!
Letter at
https://www.amazonclimatejustice.org
(Seattle, WA) Troubled by the environmental, social, and political impacts of Amazon’s AI rollout, 1,039 employees have signed and released an Open Letter on AI.
The letter was drafted by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group that helped to pressure Amazon into creating the Climate Pledge in 2019. That original campaign began with an open letter, evolved into packing shareholder meetings, and culminated in Amazon announcing the Climate Pledge the day before a planned employee walkout.
Employees in AECJ, who have continued to monitor Amazon’s progress towards its climate goals, claim that Amazon is casting aside those goals to build AI. The company has spent over $100 billion this year alone on data centers for AI, which is causing utilities to build new gas plants or delay retirement of coal plants to keep up with the power demand, and has strategized to hide the actual footprint of its data centers and water consumption....
AWS has long commanded the largest market share of cloud-based internet services, with hundreds of data centers across the world that provide the backend infrastructure for countless AI applications, and has been trying to use its infrastructure foothold to get ahead in the AI race. Just this year, Amazon closed billion-dollar deals with AI giants like Nvidia and Anthropic, as well as contracting with the US government.
The letter also details concerns about Amazon’s ties to mass surveillance, deportation, and militarization. The signatories are not alone; this Thanksgiving holiday weekend, protestors across Chicago (IL), Newark (NJ), New York City (NY), Oakland (CA), San Bernardino (CA), and Washington, D.C. will rally against Amazon’s contracts which power Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)’s raids. As Amazon enjoys one of its highest sales volume seasons of the year, community members are demanding that the corporation end its complicity in Trump’s detention and deportation agenda by serving as the technological backbone for ICE’s surveillance machine.
The signatories are hoping that other tech workers will join them in speaking out for a more human-centric future; they say that as people who use—and in some cases develop—enterprise AI every day, they’re uniquely positioned to speak to its value, as well as uniquely responsible for being honest about its impacts.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” says an anonymous senior manager who’s been at the company for over 15 years. “Machine learning has real value, but the LLM race is something else altogether. It has big consequences for communities, for the climate, for our jobs, and for our democracy too. Amazon needs to do a better job leading here: that’s why we made the demands we made in the letter. I signed the letter because I hope people across this industry see they’re not alone in their concerns, and that people outside our industry see that we’re seeing problems that will hurt them too.”
The letter highlights three demands: 1. No AI with dirty energy; 2. No AI without employee input; and 3. No AI for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.
“I signed because the letter asks for the kind of future I want to work on, and that Amazon claims to value,” says an anonymous senior software engineer who’s been at the company for over 10 years. “The company has been shutting down ways for people to talk openly and critically about AI, which is dangerous, and that’s why this letter is important. Amazon used to be a genuinely innovative place but leadership’s AI push has meant arbitrary quotas and benchmarks that make worse products, not better. The first step in standing up for ourselves is making ourselves heard.”
“I signed the letter because we can’t rely on our management chain for sound or data driven decisions anymore,” said an anonymous Amazon software engineer who has worked in AWS for two years. “They’re making us use AI even when it doesn’t make sense, all while helping build new gas plants to power AI data centers and threatening us with layoffs if we don’t blindly comply. I feel like I see where this is going. When the AI bubble pops, Amazon will have taken over a huge amount of land, water, and wealth. They’re getting big tax breaks for it, which means the public is subsidizing it, so the public needs to know.”
The 1,039 employees who signed the letter have a wide range of job functions and seniorities, including Principal-level engineers, senior software engineers, software engineering managers, sustainability specialists, senior product managers, applied scientists, and marketing managers, in orgs such as Artificial General Intelligence, Sustainability, Ring, Amazon Web Services, Devices, Operations, and Supply Chain Optimization Technologies (SCOT), People eXperience & Technology (PXT, Amazon’s HR org), Kuiper, Alexa, Stores, Amazon Health, AWS Public Sector, Robotics, and much more.
The Amazon employees have also gathered an additional 2,436 solidarity signatures from workers and students and are asking the public to sign on in support. Solidarity signatories include workers and students at Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Uber, Salesforce, Cisco, Space X, Boeing, Oracle, Washington Post, Walmart, Target, Starbucks, & universities including MIT, University of Washington, Columbia, UPenn, Virginia Tech, University of Oxford, University of California’s, Northeastern, University of Utah, Colorado State, Harvard, Carnegie Mellon, and many more. Job roles include software engineers, product managers, UX designers, teachers, directors, sales, graphic designers, data scientists, writers, managers, baristas, engineers, analysts, nurses, psychologists, project managers, professors, product designers, librarians, consultants, engineers, scientists, and more.
PR: https://docs.google.com/document/d/17N7J0l7bTkztvco1-qirhk5EPxekR-YL_0nOA7BWyR0/edit
