Amazon Employees for Climate Justice

On Monday, Trump sent the US back to the 1800's in search of AI dominance: he's gifting $625 million to decrepit coal plants, letting them delay adherence to water pollution rules by years, lowering the royalties from 12.5% to just 7%, & offering up 13 MILLION ACRES of federal land for coal mines.🧵

1/ It’s time to get real about Amazon and AI. Amazon coworkers: sign our open letter below to tell Amazon leadership that we need a more responsible rollout of AI. Everyone else: Send our letter to anyone who works at Amazon or even in the tech industry.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

With the recent attention to rising electricity costs and delayed climate goals, this is an inflection point! Tech workers have a rare opportunity to stand up and change the trajectory of the AI buildout. Please sign!

The choice is stark: which world do we want?

To put that acreage in context, that’s six times larger than Yellowstone National Park and includes tracts in Montana, North Dakota, Wyoming, Utah and Alabama” AND...

On Monday, Trump sent the US back to the 1800's in search of AI dominance: he's gifting $625 million to decrepit coal plants, letting them delay adherence to water pollution rules by years, lowering the royalties from 12.5% to just 7%, & offering up 13 MILLION ACRES of federal land for coal mines.🧵

11/ Help us bring the AI conversation back down to earth. Send this letter to anyone you know who works at Amazon. Ask them to read it and sign it. Amazon’s made it hard to have open conversations internally, so we need your help getting the word out.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

10/ We believe in building a better world — not in building bunkers to fall back to. 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.

9/ We demand Amazon leadership commit to the following: 1) No AI with dirty energy. 2) No AI without employee voices. 3) No AI for violence, surveillance, or mass deportation.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

8/ All of this is daunting, but none of it is inevitable. A better future is still very much within reach, but it requires us to get real about the costs of AI and the guardrails we need.

7/ And third, Amazon is helping build a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people.
bsky.app/profile/amzn...

6/ Second, Amazon is forcing us to use AI while investing in a future where it’s easier to discard us.
bsky.app/profile/amzn...

5/ We’re the workers who develop, train, and use AI, so we have a responsibility to intervene. Here’s why we’re sounding the alarm: First, Amazon is casting aside its climate goals to build AI.

bsky.app/profile/amzn...

Three years left to limit warming to 1.5C, top scientists warn The Earth could be doomed to breach a key climate target in as little as three years, scientists warn.

4/ We believe that Amazon's all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development will do staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.
www.bbc.com/news/article...

Democracy in the Shadow of the Global Rise in Authoritarian Populism Carr Center Senior Fellow Justice Luis Barroso Barroso, President of the Supreme Court of Brazil. Around the world, many longstanding democracies have begun to wither, crumbling under the slow yet adv...

3/ As employees, we have serious concerns about this aggressive rollout during the global rise of authoritarianism & our most important years to reverse the climate crisis.
www.hks.harvard.edu/centers/carr...

2/ In recent years, tech leaders have accelerated their race to build the most powerful AI first. “Sink or swim”, “AI is not going anywhere”, and “work with it or be replaced” have become mantras in workspaces at Amazon and beyond.
time.com/6255952/ai-i...

1/ It’s time to get real about Amazon and AI. Amazon coworkers: sign our open letter below to tell Amazon leadership that we need a more responsible rollout of AI. Everyone else: Send our letter to anyone who works at Amazon or even in the tech industry.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

8/ This is why we’re asking our Amazon coworkers to sign an open letter with us. If enough of us sign and this letter enters public awareness, it will add a much-needed dose of reality to the larger AI conversation, and may force leadership to respond.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

7/ 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.

Jeff Bezos' revamp of 'Washington Post' opinions leads editor to quit Billionaire Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, says the newspaper's editorial section will publish columns only "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."

6/ 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.
www.npr.org/2025/02/26/n...

Amazon Uses Arsenal of AI Weapons Against Workers A study of a union election at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, shows that the company weaponizes its algorithmic surveillance tools to prevent organizing.

5/ 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 and union-bust warehouse workers, and, of course, its own customers.
prospect.org/labor/2025-0...

Ice director wants to run deportations like ‘Amazon Prime for human beings’ Todd Lyons said he wanted US immigration agency to be ‘like a business’ in its deportation process

4/ 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.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...

Shield AI and AWS collaborate to deliver mission autonomy at fleet scale | Amazon Web Services This significant growth in military unmanned aerial vehicles, which serve as a proxy for the broader autonomous systems market, underscores the urgent need for scalable, secure, and efficient software...

3/ The military wants AI technologies at top speed; Amazon has announced a collaboration with an autonomous weapons company.
aws.amazon.com/blogs/public...

Amazon scrubs DEI mention from its annual report Amazon has removed any references to diversity and inclusion from its most recent annual report.

2/ Trump demanded an end to “wokeness” in AI; Amazon has wound down its commitments to DEI and offered the administration a 1 billion dollar coupon for AWS, with a DOGE commissioner calling the deal “a foundational piece to help implement Trump’s AI Action Plan.”
www.cnbc.com/2025/02/07/a...

Big Tech pushes for 10-year ban on US states regulating AI Call by Amazon, Google and Microsoft lobbyists for a ‘moratorium’ has split industry and the Republican party

1/ Amazon is helping build a more militarized surveillance state with fewer protections for ordinary people. Amazon, Meta, MSFT & Google lobbied to ban state regulation on AI for 10 years; Trump included financial disincentives for state regulation in his AI Action Plan.
www.ft.com/content/52ae...

5/ This is why we’re asking our Amazon coworkers to sign an open letter with us. If enough of us sign and this letter enters public awareness, it will add a much-needed dose of reality to the larger AI conversation, and may force leadership to respond.
www.amazonclimatejustice.org/open-letter?...

4/ All this, while Amazon is attempting to declare the National Labor Relations Board, which protects workers’ rights, unconstitutional.
www.npr.org/2024/11/18/n...

3/ Our logistics coworkers have been especially impacted by work speedups, surveillance, injuries and burnout.
www.help.senate.gov/imo/media/do...

At Amazon, Some Coders Say Their Jobs Have Begun to Resemble Warehouse Work

2/ But here’s what we’re actually experiencing: higher expected output and shorter timelines, mandates to build AI tools for wasteful use cases, and massive investment in AI with little investment in career advancement.
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/25/b...

Message from CEO Andy Jassy: Some thoughts on Generative AI The message below was shared with Amazon employees earlier today.

1/ Amazon is forcing us to use AI while investing in a future where it’s easier to discard us. Andy Jassy promised Amazon will be full of AI tools and “agents,” that he expects to employ fewer humans, that our (remaining) jobs will be “even more exciting and fun”
www.aboutamazon.com/news/company...