Amazon to hold engineering meeting over recent outages. Is AI coding to blame?

A briefing note seen by the FT mentioned a trend of incidents recently including “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.”

The note did not specify which particular incidents the group planned to discuss, the report said.

A 13-hour interruption to Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) operations in December was caused by an AI agent, Kiro, autonomously choosing to “delete and then recreate” a part of its environment, the Financial Times reported.

Another incident, in October, downed dozens of sites for hours and prompted discussion over the concentration of online services on infrastructure owned by a few massive companies.

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Dave Treadwell, a senior vice-president at the group, told employees in an email also seen by the FT.

Junior and mid-level engineers will now require more senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes, according to Treadwell.

Amazon (AMZN) told the FT the review of website availability was “part of normal business” and it aims for continual improvement.

The incident raises questions about the governance and control of artificial intelligence. A recent paper by Alibaba Cloud revealed that an experimental AI agent tried to redirect computing resources toward cryptocurrency mining and to smuggle them to an external server, despite not being asked to do anything of the kind.

Nik Kairinos, CEO & Co-founder of Raids AI, comments: “In this instance, the developers had guardrails in place and a warning of a security breach was triggered. But we’ve seen many examples of where this isn’t the case, of where AI has gone rogue and resulted in financial loss, emotional distress, reputational damage and regulatory action."