Amazon lays off AI team staff, says it wants to focus on what matters most for consumers
In 2026, there seems to be no end to layoffs, with Amazon announcing its latest round of job cuts on Wednesday. This time, the company
In 2026, there seems to be no end to layoffs, with Amazon announcing its latest round of job cuts on Wednesday. This time, the company has laid off employees from its AGI unit, responsible for developing its frontier AI models. This comes just months after the American giant cut around 30,000 jobs globally. Amazon said that it had cut jobs from the AGI team, but did not disclose the number of employees affected. This comes at a time when Amazon says that it is focusing more on things its consumers want. Read Full Story Before we delve into why Amazon has cut AGI jobs, do note that companies like Microsoft, Meta, and others have also laid off thousands of workers in recent months. Why did Amazon layoff workers from AGI team? Amazon’s AGI unit is focused on building AI models and also includes teams working on silicon development and quantum computing. This includes the company’s Nova AI models. AGI stands for artificial general intelligence – a state where AI can start thinking like humans, and potentially surpass human intelligence. Though AGI remains a long-term goal at the moment, with companies like Amazon and OpenAI working towards reaching it. However, the tech giant seems to be restructuring internally as it focuses more on what matters most to its customers.
In a statement, an Amazon spokesperson said, "This is a fast-moving space, and we are sharpening our focus on the initiatives that matter most for customers, so we can move faster on what counts.” The spokesperson added, “That focus means some difficult decisions, including eliminating some roles within parts of our AGI organisation, even as we continue to invest in the areas most important to our customers' future." Amazon worker says they got laid off after their birthday Some Amazon employees who were impacted by the layoffs shared the news on X. One person, Kyle Wong, said that they were laid off just a day after they turned 23. Kyle wrote, “Yesterday was my 23rd birthday. As a present, I got laid off from Amazon AGI!” He added, “Please reach out if you have any openings!” Kyle Wong claimed that he lost his job a day after his birthday. Another AGI employee, Miao Xiong, said that she was one of many who had lost their job in the team. She added that while she worked at filtering important data points for AI models, it was her job that was actually filtered out. Xiong wrote, “My job was deciding which data points matter for pretraining.
Turns out I was the one that got filtered out.” Miao Xiong revealed a rather awkward encounter following the layoffs. Xiong said that the layoffs created an awkward situation within the team later as they received a meeting reminder for a project that no longer had anyone in it. She explained, “At 1 pm, the reminder for our weekly project sync still went off — for a project that no longer has a team. We could only exchange a smile that needed no words.” Amazon severance package for impacted employees As per the company, affected employees in the US will receive 90 days of pay and benefits as part of the severance package. They will also get outplacement support, and transitional healthcare benefits. Despite the job cuts, Amazon says that it will continue to invest in AI. Amazon is scheduled to report its second-quarter results next week, and the company has forecast capital expenditure of $200 billion for the year, up more than 50 per cent from 2025, while raising tens of billions of dollars in debt to help fund its AI build-out. Apart from its own AI unit, the company also works with AI labs like OpenAI and Anthropic.
The BriefWire