Amazon’s internal review of its AI tools and usage serves as a reminder that the technology is far from perfect. Without the necessary supervision and human oversight set in place, such infrastructure remains standing on unstable grounds.
The success promised by AI is often obscured by its limitations, and matters appear similarly inclined at Amazon. Recent outages at Amazon’s e-commerce site have officially been linked to their internal use of AI coding tools, at least one of which has been tied to Amazon’s own AI coding assistant Q. The alleged AI-caused outage at Amazon recently resulted in a meeting between Senior VP Dave Treadwell and the company’s engineers, with a few more guardrails added to the process of implementing AI-assisted changes. While there is uncertainty regarding AI regulations in the US, emerging incidents show us that not only is greater oversight required over the use and misuse of AI, but also in the deployment of these tools in the real world.
Amazon’s recent outages have been linked to AI, with an internal review recently conducted to discuss new safeguards that need to be set in place. (Image: Pexels)
Amazon Conducts an Internal Review of Its AI Usage and the Resulting Implications for the Business
The Financial Times recently drew our attention to an internal meeting at Amazon, which was held to discuss recent AI-fueled outages at the organization. In the most recent incident, an outage left thousands of users complaining of crashing websites, apps, and checkout failures for a brief period last week. Similar issues have also occurred in the company’s cloud unit, Amazon Web Services (AWS), over the last few months. At the time, Amazon pointed to how the tools were employed as the cause for the outage rather than a fault with the tools themselves, suggesting that “the same issue that could occur with any developer tool (AI-powered or not) or manual action.”
More recently, the TWiST meeting, which was regularly scheduled and typically optional to attend, saw engineers gather for a discussion with Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s SVP of e-commerce services. He conducted a deep dive into the “trend of incidents” that have occurred since the third quarter of 2025, addressing the problems and the “high blast radius” of the changes, where suitable safeguards were lacking in the company operations.
CNBC reported that while an older version of the document clearly highlighted “GenAI-assisted changes” involving “GenAI tools” as part of the cause for these incidents, this bullet point was deleted before the meeting. Amazon later told the news portal that only a single instance was linked to AI-written code, suggesting that other factors were to blame for the most part.
How Is Amazon Responding to Its AI Code Failures and Outage Issues?
Amazon’s internal review of the incidents did lead the discussion back to AI, with the company set to reinforce certain safeguards that may not have been effectively put into effect in recent days. “We are implementing temporary safety practices, which will introduce controlled friction to changes in the most important parts of the Retail experience. In parallel, we will invest in more durable solutions, including both deterministic and agentic safeguards,” Treadwell wrote in the internal document.
This reference to “deterministic and agentic” changes brings to light the current mindset surrounding this technology, where agentic AI tools continue to lead the way despite their shortcomings, and yet reliable, repeatable results are also in demand. The very nature of AI and its results make it a tough tool to fully employ in the corporate world, where determinable results are essential.
The Amazon engineers’ deep dive also involved a discussion on increased supervision, not for the tools themselves, but for junior and mid-level engineers, who will now require senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes they implement.
Human Supervisions Continues to Remain Essential In the Era of AI
While the specifics of Amazon’s AI code failures are discussion topics for the more technologically inclined, the incident and the resulting conversation show us that there is considerable uncertainty around artificial intelligence and its potential to revolutionize the workplace. While Amazon has continued to make steady progress, not only in advancing its AI offerings but also in its internal growth in the realm of AI and automation, the company hasn’t yet perfected its understanding and operations around AI.
Meanwhile, the employer has announced sizable layoffs across its operations, slashing roles with considerable gusto to optimize for change. Reducing the number of available employees while simultaneously channeling investments into AI appears to be the leading strategy for 2026, however, this vastly limits how many people are actively available to monitor the technology. While AI might be perfectly capable of generating content and code, assessing its results, fine-tuning its performance, and eliminating errors is still an essential part of the process.
Businesses have poured too much into the technology to acknowledge its limitations and shortcomings, and this aversion to discussing the failings of AI only serves to hurt operations. Realizing as much, employees at Amazon wrote an open letter to the organization, asking for caution with the technology. Transparency with regard to the technology and an honest conversation about the safeguards necessary to operate these tools is essential in ensuring that it works as intended, and the Amazon engineers’ deep dive into these issues is a clear example of this.
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