Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is going to lead to unprecedented productivity gains which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes. Internally, Amazon employees mock the company\u2019s AI tools, refer to its output as \u201cslop,\u201d and joke about the company\u2019s failed attempt to motivate employees to use AI tools effectively.\u00a0The memes are yet another example of the contrast between what AI companies say in public about its potential power and benefit versus the reality of how the people who help create these AI tools use and criticize them internally. Amazon employees told me about these memes after they saw my story last week about Google employees also internally sharing memes critical of Google\u2019s AI tools.\u00a0\u201cNow I have everything I need,\u201d says the text over an image of a jet taking off in one meme posted by an Amazon employee. The jet is edited to carry the purple ghost logo for Kiro, Amazon\u2019s AI-powered coding tool. \u201cNarrator: He did not have everything he needed,\u201d says the text over an image of a bunch of people left behind on the tarmac. I’ve recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources. \u201cKiro: \u2018Confirmed I have the full picture,\u2019\u201d says the text over an image of an iceberg that appears small above water but is hiding a huge mass underwater in another meme posted by an Amazon employee.\u00a0One meme just showed Kiro\u2019s logo, as well as an image of a bee and a lion implying that Kiro be lyin\u2019.Another meme just shows Cillian Murphy\u2019s face as Robert Oppenheimer in the movie Oppenheimer, surrounded by logos of AI coding tools like Amazon\u2019s Kiro, Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code, and an AI agent called Meshclaw. The text on the image simply reads \u201cSloppenheimer.\u201d The meme apparently refers to the fact that Amazon employees have been encouraged to use all of these tools at some point.\u00a0For this story, I talked to multiple Amazon employees who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. They said that this discussion is mostly taking place on a company Slack channel called #actual-aws-memes. While most of the memes I saw were critical of AI, one Amazon employee told me that there\u2019s a \u201cspectrum\u201d of opinions shared in the channel.\u00a0\ud83d\udca1Is your company internally criticizing the same AI products the company is publicly advertising? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at \u202a@emanuel.404\u202c. Otherwise, send me an email at emanuel@404media.co.\u201cActual-aws-memes is a place to blow off steam so it skews negative, but I’d say the genres of most are \u2018Oh boy, we get to use Claude Code now instead of Kiro,\u2019 \u2018Earnest Kiro user complaining about its limitations,\u2019 and some genuine frustration with corporate policy,\u201d The Amazon employee told me. \u201cI’m an AI hater, so I prefer to think they agree with me, but there’s more of a spectrum than that.\u201dAnother Amazon employee told me that the anti-AI memes started around the end of 2024 and the start of 2025, \u201cwhen [AI] adoption started to get really forced by leadership.\u201d”I think people meme about anything they’re around a lot, and obviously AI is a common topic,” Another Amazon employee told me. “Of course it doesn’t help that leadership is definitely pushing AI so there’s probably some element of backlash.”A few of the recent memes shared in the channel directly reference the fact that Amazon had just shut down an internal leaderboard which tracked how much Amazon employees were using Kiro. In an official internal statement and in comment to 404 Media, Amazon said it had shut down the leaderboard because it had achieved its goal of motivating and teaching people to use AI tools. However, Amazon employees told 404 Media that management decided to shut down the leaderboard because people were cheating by tasking Kiro with completing unnecessary tasks and because it was resulting in wasteful, expensive AI use.\u00a0\u201cWhen they shut down the leaderboard, there was a lot of [discussion in the slack channel] \u2018Well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen when you incentivized people to drive up usage,\u2019\u201d the Amazon employee told me.\u00a0One Amazon employee shared an image of the \u201cstonks\u201d going down meme and said \u201cAI usage after the PTI incentives goes away.\u201dOne Amazon employee shared a fake certificate for a \u201cparticipation award\u201d to AWS and Goodhart\u2019s Law for \u201ccheesing a leaderboard we probably should have known you would cheese.\u201d Goodhart\u2019s law is the adage that \u201cwhen a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,\u201d which is what some Amazon employees thought was the effect of the leaderboard. Amazon measured and rewarded AI use, so employees used a lot of AI, but not in a way that produced any value.\u00a0Another meme referencing the leaderboard and several Amazon AI products like Ask Rufus, Amazon Q, and Amazon Nova asked \u201cWhat do you mean by \u2018value?\u2019 AI itself is the purpose for everything, no?\u201dOne Amazon employee told me that he saw Amazon employees in the chat discussing how to cheat the leaderboard.\u00a0\u201cI saw some of that, mostly the occasional \u2018you know, it’d be really easy to set up a shell script to do this\u2019 or \u2018my cron job that calls Kiro every hour or so.\u2019 Hard to tell if it was actual planning or just engineers noticing how easy it would be to cheat the system,\u201d another Amazon employee told me.\u00a0In an email, Amazon told me that the negative AI comments on Slack are just from a few individuals and don’t represent the perspective of the company or the vast majority of employees. “We\u2019re always looking to understand our teams\u2019 experiences with various tools \u2013 that\u2019s how we learn what works for them and what doesn\u2019t \u2013 and while this handful of comments doesn’t reflect what we hear from most Kiro users, we still appreciate the chance to learn from the feedback,” Amazon said. “In general, we\u2019re seeing incredible improvements in efficiency and delivery from Kiro, which more than 80% of our software developers use. Kiro offers differentiated capabilities that other tools don’t provide, particularly in spec-driven development and property-based testing. These aren’t just incremental improvements\u2014they represent a fundamentally different approach to AI-assisted development that prioritizes production readiness and correctness.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"