As Google and Microsoft continue to surge, the AWS chief lays out his pitch: cheaper, reliable AI delivered at hyperscale. You might think Amazon's biggest swing in the AI race was its $8 billion investment in Anthropic. But AWS has also been building in-house foundation models, new chips, massive data centers, and agents meant to keep enterprise customers locked inside its ecosystem. The company believes these offerings will give it an edge as businesses of all shapes and sizes deploy AI in the real world. WIRED sat down with AWS CEO Matt Garman ahead of the company's annual re:Invent conference in Las Vegas to discuss his AI vision, and how he plans to extend Amazon's lead in the cloud market over its fast-rising competitors, Microsoft and Google.

Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says that over 1,000 workers have signed a petition raising "serious concerns" about the company's "aggressive rollout" of artificial intelligence tools. Over 1,000 Amazon employees have anonymously signed an open letter warning that the company's allegedly "all-costs-justified, warp-speed approach to AI development" could cause "staggering damage to democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth," an internal advocacy group announced on Wednesday. Four members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice tell WIRED that they began asking workers to sign the letter last month. After reaching their initial goal, the group published on Wednesday the job titles of the Amazon employees who signed and disclosed that more than 2,400 supporters from other organizations, including Google and Apple, have also joined in. Backers inside Amazon include high-ranking engineers, senior product leaders, marketing managers, and warehouse staff spanning many divisions of the company.

Is artificial intelligence to blame for Amazon job cuts? Multinational technology company Amazon is laying off about 14,000 employees, the company has confirmed . A message sent out to staff on the company's website followed media reports that the group was planning 30,000 job cuts. News of the layoffs on Tuesday came just a few months after CEO Andrew Jassy said the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) technology was likely to s pell job cuts . He also launched an "inefficiencies initiative" in which he invited workers to report unnecessary bureaucracy and inefficiencies that could be targeted for cost savings.

Last week, Amazon extended buyout offers to hundreds of its recruiters as part of what is expected to be a months-long cycle of layoffs that has left corporate employees across the company angered and on edge. Now, Recode has viewed a confidential internal document that raises the question of whether a new artificial intelligence technology that the company began experimenting with last year will one day replace some of these employees. According to an October 2021 internal paper labeled as "Amazon confidential," the tech giant has been working for at least the last year to hand over some of its recruiters' tasks to an AI technology that aims to predict which job applicants across certain corporate and warehouse jobs will be successful in a given role and fast-track them to an interview -- without a human recruiter's involvement. The technology works in part by finding similarities between the resumes of current, well-performing Amazon employees and those of job applicants applying for similar jobs. The technology, known internally as Automated Applicant Evaluation, or AAE, was built by a group in Amazon's HR division known as the Artificial Intelligence Recruitment team and was first tested last year.

It's 1am on the west coast of America, but the Emerald Cloud Lab, just south of San Francisco, is still busy. I'm "visiting" via the camera on a chest-high telepresence robot, being driven round the 1,400 sq metre (15,000 sq ft) lab by Emerald's CEO, Brian Frezza, who is also sitting at home. There are no actual scientists anywhere, just a few staff in blue coats quietly following instructions from screens on their trolleys, ensuring the instruments are loaded with reagents and samples. Cloud labs mean anybody, anywhere can conduct experiments by remote control, using nothing more than their web browser. Experiments are programmed through a subscription-based online interface – software then coordinates robots and automated scientific instruments to perform the experiment and process the data.

Stephen Normandin spent almost four years racing around Phoenix delivering packages as a contract driver for Amazon.com Then one day, he received an automated email. The algorithms tracking him had decided he wasn't doing his job properly. The 63-year-old Army veteran was stunned. He'd been fired by a machine. Normandin says Amazon punished him for things beyond his control that prevented him from completing his deliveries, such as locked apartment complexes. He said he took the termination hard and, priding himself on a strong work ethic, recalled that during his military career he helped cook for 250,000 Vietnamese refugees at Fort Chaffee in Arkansas.

Yes, someone might listen to your Alexa conversations someday. A Bloomberg report has detailed how Amazon employs thousands of full-timers and contractors from around the world to review audio clips from Echo devices. Apparently, these workers transcribe and annotate recordings, which they then feed back into the software to make Alexa smarter than before. The process helps beef up the voice AI's understanding of human speech, especially for non-English-speaking countries or for places with distinctive regional colloquialisms. In French, for instance, an Echo speaker could hear avec sa ("with his" or "with her") as "Alexa" and treat it as a wake word.

Amazon has admitted that employees listen to customer voice recordings from Echo and other Alexa-enabled smart speakers. The online retail giant said its staff "reviewed" a sample of Alexa voice assistant conversations in order to improve speech recognition. "This information helps us train our speech recognition and natural language understanding systems, so Alexa can better understand your requests, and ensure the service works well for everyone," Amazon said in a statement. We'll tell you what's true. You can form your own view.

Amazon's warehouses will be staffed by less humans and more robots over the busy Christmas period, a leading analyst has claimed. The retail giant recruits thousands of additional employees every year to help meet the increased demand of the festive period. Amazon is only recruiting an additional 100,000 people for this year, down 20,000 from the two previous Christmases. Citi analyst Mark May told CNBC that this is likely a early sign of the increased automation at Amazon as it lessens its reliance on human employees. Amazon has endured several controversies surrounding working conditions in its fulfilment centres with claims of staff being forced to urinate into a bottle and employees not being paid after suffering serious injuries art work.

Amazon tried to sell its AI-powered facial recognition technology to the US government to help catch illegal immigrants. It pitched its product to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials this summer, leaked emails show. The emails were first reported by The Daily Beast as part of a Freedom of Information Act request from the advocacy group Project on Government Oversight. Emails revealed the intention of Amazon to use its controversial Rekognition face-scanning technology to help with the country's security. The facial recognition technology has attracted scrutiny since it was revealed Amazon had sold it to several US police departments.