For now, Amazon has a new AI rule for the next 90 days: junior and mid-level engineers now need senior sign-off on any AI-assisted production changes. They’ll also be resetting their code practices and re‑emphasizing traditional safeguards. Engineers in the e‑commerce group have been told to attend normally optional weekly meetings focused on recent outages and new rules around generative‑AI‑driven deployments.
Publicly, Amazon has pushed back against the narrative that AI agents themselves “caused” the outages. Instead, it has been reframing these failures as classic access-control and process failures. Company spokespeople have repeatedly said the incidents were user error and coincidence, stressing that they have “no evidence” that AI tools make mistakes more often than traditional software developers.
Amazon’s top brass is missing the point. Of course, humans must take the blame. If Amazon executives had a clue, they might recall that back in 1979, an IBM training manual stated, “A computer can never be held accountable, therefore a computer must never make a management decision.” Unfortunately, from the top down, Amazon is insisting that AI be used even when, as has become apparent, it doesn’t work that well.
Read the full article here
