Amazon cuts over 2,300 jobs in Washington as employees warn of AI risks

The local impact of Amazon’s latest round of layoffs is coming into focus.

Of the 14,000 employees Amazon laid off this week, 2,303 were in its home state of Washington, according to a state filing.

In addition to streamlining and removing bureaucracy, Amazon officials have tied the workforce reduction to artificial intelligence. That's materializing in two key ways.

First, reducing headcount frees up capital for Amazon's multi-billion-dollar data center building spree. Tech companies are spending aggressively to build out the infrastructure needed to train and power frontier AI models.

Second, Amazon appears to be betting AI can reduce the number of employees the company needs.

"We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs," Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in a June memo, a full-throated call for employees to embrace AI. "It’s hard to know exactly where this nets out over time, but in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company."

Between 2023 and 2024, Amazon's headcount in Washington state shrunk for the first time in its history, according to an analysis from GeekWire.

Some employees say Amazon's rapid embrace of AI is more investor spectacle than substance. Marie is a machine learning engineer who asked to only be identified by her middle name because she's afraid speaking out could cost her job. She's circulating an open letter written by Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an employee activist group that calls for a more responsible rollout of AI.

"Because we're already familiar with machine learning, we understand it doesn't work for everything," Marie said. "There are weaknesses and there are flaws. But in spite of that, we are being asked to use it more ... even if we're working on something where it doesn't help a whole lot or it's overkill for the problem we're trying to solve, there's this pressure to try and use it because it looks good or sounds good."

Amazon says generative AI is "the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet," and, along with other big tech companies, is placing big bets on its future. Amazon's multi-state, multi-billion-dollar hyperscale data center initiative is called Project Rainier, named for the mountain in its backyard.

Amazon predicts its investments in AI will revolutionize the customer experience, and drive significant revenue for the company. But for some employees at Amazon headquarters, the future doesn't appear quite so bright.

"AI may be useful for some things, but we shouldn't just build it and find out ... it's having an impact now," Marie said. "It's having an impact on jobs, on quality of what we produce, and on climate, and we shouldn't just solve those problems later after we've had the impact. I want them to know that people who are in the industry are concerned about this. The engineers, the scientists developing this do have concerns and we shouldn't ignore that just for the profit."