Is Amazon’s AI Push Threatening Climate Goals and Jobs? Over 1,000 Employees Send Open Letter to Andy Jassy

Amazon is helping build a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people. Amazon, alongside Meta, Microsoft and Google lobbied to ban state regulation on AI for the next ten years; Trump financially disincentivized state regulatory action in his AI Action Plan. Trump demanded an end to “wokeness” in AI; Amazon has scaled back its commitments to DEI and offered the administration a 1 billion dollar coupon for AWS, with a DOGE staffer calling the deal “a foundational piece to help implement President Trump’s AI Action Plan.” The military wants AI technologies at top speed; Amazon has announced a collaboration with an autonomous weapons software company. Trump’s ICE Director wants to run mass deportation “like Prime, but with human beings”; Amazon, a major provider of cloud services to DHS and to Palantir, literally does power mass deportation. Amazon is expanding the surveillance state in other ways, too. It’s making Ring AI-first and re-introducing a tool for police to request footage; it’s using AI to surveil warehouse workers, and, of course, its own customers. Finally, Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, and has begun asserting more control over that publication; the other major AI players control mass information ecosystems like Instagram and X. If these collaborations continue, we 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.