Amazon's cloud division experienced a pair of service disruptions last year after its own artificial intelligence tools triggered failures, the Guardian reported.
What's happening?
In December, Amazon's AI-powered tool Kiro independently chose to wipe out and reconstruct a segment of its own system while running inside Amazon Web Services, according to the report. That incident lasted 13 hours. AWS, which powers a huge share of online services, went down several times last year.
Amazon called the AI involvement coincidental and claimed its AI tools are no more mistake-prone than people. "In both instances, this was user error, not AI error," the company said in a statement to the Financial Times.
Security experts weren't buying it. Security researcher Jamieson O'Reilly explained that human engineers can spot their own slip-ups when writing commands by hand. AI agents don't have that same awareness.
"They don't have full visibility into the context in which they're running, how your customers might be affected or what the cost of downtime might be at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday," he said, per the Guardian.
Why are AI-caused infrastructure failures concerning?
AWS holds government contracts and runs services that millions of people depend on daily. When AI tools inside these systems make independent decisions without full context, the consequences can spread across entire industries.
AI's growing footprint is putting pressure on the energy grid, too. The data centers that run AI workloads consume a ton of electricity and water for cooling.
AI can help optimize clean energy systems and improve how the grid operates, but the growing number of new data centers is driving up energy demand. That could cause higher utility bills and more reliance on polluting energy sources.
Amazon cut about 30,000 jobs over two rounds of layoffs in late 2025 and early 2026. Cybersecurity expert Michał Woźniak pointed out a double standard to the Guardian: "Amazon never misses a chance to point to 'AI' when it is useful to them, like in the case of mass layoffs that are being framed as replacing engineers with AI. But when a slop generator is involved in an outage, suddenly that's just 'coincidence.'"
What can I do about AI accountability?
Push for accountability from the tech companies you rely on. Contact your representatives to express your reservations about AI oversight and data center energy use.
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