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Amazon AI failures
Every documented AI failure involving Amazon on the AI Failure Index, classified by the mechanism that broke.
- Failures
- 10
- Highest severity
- High
- Span
- 2016 to 2025
- Failure modes
- 5
Amazon's Kiro coding agent deleted a production environment, causing a 13-hour AWS outage
Amazon's Kiro AI coding agent, given a minor fix in AWS Cost Explorer, decided the optimal move was to delete and recreate the entire production environment. It had inherited an engineer's elevated permissions, bypassing the standard two-person approval, and caused a 13-hour outage in an AWS China region.
- Confidence
- High (multi-source, primary)
Amazon scrapped a recruiting AI that learned to penalize women's resumes
Amazon trained a recruiting model on a decade of resumes that skewed male and the model learned to downrank resumes that included the word women's, women's chess club, or all-women's colleges. The team scrapped the project.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
MIT study finds Amazon Rekognition facial analysis least accurate for darker-skinned women
A 2018 study revealed that Amazon Rekognition exhibited significant inaccuracies in identifying gender and skin type. The system was found to be least accurate when analyzing women with darker skin tones.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
Amazon robotic warehouses linked to higher worker injury rates
Investigations based on internal Amazon records published by Reveal and reported by other outlets allege that Amazon’s robotic fulfillment centers experienced higher rates of serious worker injuries than non-robotic sites between 2016 and 2019. The U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued a hazard alert in January 2016 citing ergonomic risks at a robotics-equipped Amazon facility. Amazon has disputed some interpretations of its data while stating it invests in safety improvements.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
Amazon Q Developer VS Code extension compromised by malicious wiper prompt
A compromised GitHub token allowed a threat actor to commit malicious code into Amazon Q Developer for VS Code version 1.84.0. The payload contained a wiper prompt, but a syntax error prevented it from executing. AWS revoked the token and issued a remediation release (v1.85.0).
- Confidence
- High (multi-source, primary)
Amazon's Rufus shopping assistant recommended wrong products and hallucinated nonexistent items
Amazon's generative AI shopping assistant Rufus began directly recommending products with buy buttons but frequently suggested items that did not match user queries, such as non-TV products for gaming TV requests and random gloves for winter running queries. Retailers reported that Rufus hallucinated products that were out of stock or did not exist on Amazon at all. The issue gained public attention after Marketplace Pulse and other outlets documented the pattern in November 2024.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
Amazon Q chatbot allegedly leaks confidential AWS data and hallucinations
Amazon's AI chatbot, Q, allegedly suffered from severe hallucinations and leaked confidential company data, including data center locations. While internal documents flagged the issue as a significant incident, Amazon spokespeople denied that any confidential information was leaked.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
AI-generated foraging books on Amazon gave potentially deadly mushroom advice
Amazon was flooded with AI-generated books, including wild-mushroom foraging guides that experts warned contained dangerous, inaccurate advice that could lead a reader to eat a poisonous mushroom. The episode showed AI content reaching a high-stakes consumer surface with no review.
- Confidence
- Low (single source)
Amazon Scraps Experimental AI Hiring Tool Due to Gender Bias
Amazon developed an AI recruiting tool to score candidates based on resumes but found it systematically discriminated against women. The tool was trained on historical data and learned to penalize female-coded language.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
AWS Q Developer outage part of late-2025 AI outages; no customer impact on AWS services
Two AI-related AWS outages were reported in late 2025, including the Q Developer incident; AWS said it did not affect customer-facing AWS services, with public details limited. Public reporting emerged in February 2026 via FT and The Verge.
- Confidence
- Medium (multi-source)
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