Corporate employees said Amazon's race to roll out AI is leading to surveillance, slop and'more work for everyone'. When Dina, a software developer based in New York, joined Amazon two years ago, her job was to write code. The internal AI tool she's expected to use, called Kiro, frequently hallucinates and generates flawed code, she says. Then she has to dig through and correct the sloppy code it creates, or just revert all changes and start again. She says it feels like "trying to AI my way out of a problem that AI caused".

OpenAI has signed a new deal valued at $38bn with Amazon that will allow the artificial intelligence giant to run AI workloads across Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure. The seven-year deal announced on Monday is the first big AI push for the e-commerce giant after a restructuring last week. Experts say this does not mean that it will allow OpenAI to train its model on websites hosted by AWS - which includes the websites of The New York Times, Reddit and United Airlines. "Running OpenAI training inside AWS doesn't change their ability to scrape content from AWS-hosted websites [which they could already do for anything publicly readable]. This is strictly speaking about the economics of rent vs buy for GPU [graphics processing unit] capacity," Joshua McKenty, CEO of the AI detection company PolyguardAI, told Al Jazeera. The deal is also a major vote of confidence for the e-commerce giant's cloud unit, AWS, which some investors feared had fallen behind rivals Microsoft and Google in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. An aerial view of an Amazon Web Services Data Center known as US East 1 in Ashburn, Virginia on 20 October 2025. Thu 30 Oct 2025 16.50 EDTLast modified on Fri 31 Oct 2025 05.25 EDT Amazon has made its first financial disclosures since the disastrous outage suffered by its cloud computing division that brought everything from smart beds to banks offline. In spite of the global outage, Amazon Web Services has continued to grow, and this quarter reported a 20% increase in revenue year over year. Wall Street estimated that AWS would bring in $32.42bn in net sales in the third quarter, with the company reporting actual revenue of $33bn.

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.

Amazon is planning major job cuts among its corporate workers as soon as this week, multiple media outlets have reported. The online retail giant plans to lay off as many as 30,000 employees as part of cost-cutting measures led by chief executive Andy Jassy, according to the Wall Street Journal and Reuters. Each cited sources stating the same number of layoffs. Amazon declined to comment when contacted by the BBC. If confirmed, the layoffs could be one of the largest seen in recent months.

The boss of Amazon has told white collar staff at the e-commerce company their jobs could be taken by artificial intelligence in the next few years. Andrew Jassy told employees that AI agents – tools that carry out tasks autonomously – and generative AI systems such as chatbots would require fewer employees in certain areas. "As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done," he said in a memo to staff. "We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs. "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." Amazon employs 1.5 million people worldwide, with about 350,000 working in corporate jobs such as software engineering and marketing. At the weekend the chief executive of the UK telecoms company BT said advances in AI could lead to deeper job cuts at the company, while Dario Amodei, the chief executive of the AI company Anthropic, said last month AI could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs. Jassy said in the near future there would be billions of AI agents working across companies and in people's daily lives. "There will be billions of these agents, across every company and in every imaginable field.

For me, one of the most surprising things at Amazon's lavish Alexa event earlier this week was what didn't happen. Oh no, Amazon goes big at these events, aiming a firehose of products at the quivering journalists in attendance. The parade goes at a breathless pace, one after another, so fast that you can barely keep up. Uncharacteristically, Amazon held its fire last fall, skipping its usual September event in favor of a smaller, Kindles-only gathering in October, featuring ex-Microsoft exec and new Amazon devices chief Panos Panay. So when Amazon announced it was having an "Alexa-focused" event this week, I braced myself.

If you're wondering what happened to Amazon's new and improved version of its Alexa voice assistant, you're not alone. Bloomberg reports that the new Alexa is still stuck in its developmental phase and Amazon has cut off access to its beta phase including its new "Let's Chat" phase. As a result, a planned late 2024 launch has been pushed back to next year. The problem seems to be with its large language models (LLMs). The new Alexa is designed to understand more complicated questions from users but it's also more likely to fail doing some of the most basic things the old version could do quite easily like create a timer or operate smart lights, according to a follow up report from The Verge. Amazon originally planned to unveil its new version of Alexa AI in October but now the timeline has been extended into next year.

We've known for a while that Amazon is planning to soup up Alexa with generative AI features. While the company says it has been integrating that into various aspects of the voice assistant, it's also working on a more advanced version of Alexa that it plans to charge users to access. Amazon has reportedly dubbed the higher tier "Remarkable Alexa" (let's hope it doesn't stick with that name for the public rollout). According to Reuters, Amazon is still determining pricing and a release date for Remarkable Alexa, but it has mooted a fee of between roughly 5 and 10 per month for consumers to use it. Amazon is also said to have been urging its workers to have Remarkable Alexa ready by August -- perhaps so it's able to discuss the details as its usual fall Alexa and devices event. This will mark the first major revamp of Alexa since Amazon debuted the voice assistant alongside Echo speakers a decade ago.

Profits at Amazon have surged on strong seasonal trading and robust growth in its powerhouse cloud computing business. The world's largest retailer generated revenue of 170bn in the three months to December, up 14% on the same period of 2022, and clearing expectations on Wall Street of some 166bn. Net income hit 10.6bn in the fourth quarter, from 278m a year previously, after the company moved to cut costs and draw a line under years of rapid expansion following the onset of the pandemic. Earnings per share hit 1.03. Shares in the business rose 5.5% during out-of-hours trading in New York.