Elon Musk offers warning following reports of Amazon meeting to address AI-related outages

The e-commerce big held a compulsory meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a number of outages, together with some consequently of the use of AI coding options, the Financial Times reportedciting inner briefs and emails. According to the outlet, Amazon stated there was a “trend of incidents” prior to now few months with a “high blast radius” and relating to “Gen-AI assisted changes,” in addition to different variables.

Earlier this month, Amazon’s web site and buying app have been down for some customers, with greater than 22,000 customers reporting a problem, according to outage tracker Downdetector. Customers have been unable to try, view costs for items, or entry their account info. At the time, Amazon stated the outage was a consequence of “a software code deployment.”

The report of the meeting drew the eye of tech specialists, together with Musk, who made his feedback public when he responded to a post from Lukasz Olejnik, a cybersecurity guide and visiting senior analysis fellow at Department of War Studies, King’s College London.

“Amazon is holding a mandatory meeting about AI breaking its systems,” Olejnik wrote.

“Proceed with caution,” Musk replied.

Dave Treadwell, Amazon’s senior vp of e-commerce providers, reportedly wrote in an e mail that the crew’s weekly “This Week in Stores Tech” (TWiST) meeting would partly be used to implement further guardrails on how AI is utilized by engineers, together with requiring extra senior engineers to log out of AI-assisted adjustments made by junior and mid-level engineers.

“Folks, as you likely know, the availability of the site and related infrastructure has not been good recently,” Treadwell wrote in an inner e mail, the FT reported.

An Amazon spokesperson informed Fortune that the TWiST meeting is an everyday weekly operations meeting with a gaggle of retail know-how groups and leaders to evaluate operational efficiency.

“As part of normal business, the meeting will include a review of the availability of our website and app as we focus on continuous improvement,” the spokesperson stated in a press release.

The firm confirmed Amazon Web Services (AWS) was not concerned within the incidents. Amazon stated just one incident mentioned was associated to AI, however none concerned AI-written code. Junior and mid-level engineers are additionally not required to have senior engineers log out on AI-assisted adjustments, in accordance to the corporate.

The dangers of speedy AI deployment

The outages and subsequent meeting has raised considerations from cybersecurity specialists about dangers related to the speedy rollout of AI instruments. Features like Amazon’s AI assistant Q can pace up the coding course of, producing extra code sooner, however it could come on the threat of disrupting programs for a way that code is written, checked, and deployed, making platforms extra inclined to outages, Olejnik informed Fortune.

“I’m not making an argument against implementation of AI,” he stated. “There isn’t anything. It can’t be stopped. Everybody is going to deploy AI. It’s an argument against speed for its own sake or using AI for the sake of using AI.”

Late final yr, Amazon started the method of laying off thousands of workersciting needs to turn into extra environment friendly and align the corporate culturally. Those layoffs have continued into this yr, with the corporate reducing staff by a further 16,000 in January. Meanwhile, Amazon has continued pouring cash into AI, projecting $200 billion in capex in 2026, a rise from $131 billion in 2025.

Musk, for his half, has beforehand stated AI will bypass coding completely by the top of 2026.

Olejnik warned the transition from human-centered coding to AI-run programs too rapidly may lead to lacking security checks leading to extended downtime or knowledge loss that would lead to “blowing up” a enterprise due to irresponsible AI deployment.

When requested, he stated he noticed eye-to-eye with Musk relating to the extent of consideration AI implementation in tech ought to require.

“I agree with him,” Olejnik stated. “AI brings a lot of opportunities, but there’s a middle ground between going to obsolescence due to not using AI, and blowing up businesses due to ill-judged deployments.”