Amazon’s Layoffs Are Business as Usual, Not Omens of AI Doom
The recent round of Amazon corporate layoffs isn’t a sign of an imminent AI apocalypse. It's an expression of the company's brutal corporate culture, enabled by its use of the H-1B visa program.
The Amazon headquarters in Seattle, Washington. (David Ryder / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Amazon announced recently that it is shedding fourteen thousand corporate jobs. Various sources suggest that the number may reach thirty thousand in total, in which case it would top the twenty-seven thousand laid off in 2022–23.
Two WARN notices, the state-level public filings about closures and mass layoffs, were issued on October 28. One was for Washington, where the company announced layoffs for 2,303 employees by January 26. The other was for California, where Amazon announced 1,540 more. On the same day as the notices, Amazon alerted employees about its plan to “strengthen our culture and teams,” apparently by shrinking those teams.
Some outlets have taken this news, along with layoff announcements from Target, UPS, and others, as a sign that “AI has started to bite” or, as one writer put it in Jacobin, that the “robots are handing out pink slips.” Perhaps there will come a day when fashionable new tools displace labor en masse, but a closer look at the Amazon data casts doubt on this interpretation.
So if it’s not AI, what is it? One clarifying bit of data can be found in the position-level WARN notices that Washington and California mandate: not only do they reveal the location of the worksites where people are being laid off, but they also reveal the specific job titles that are being eliminated and in what number. I did a public records request to get this data, and I’ve included all of the recent notices that I got through that request here.
I also extracted the data from the PDFs and put up the numbers here. This allows you to see the full spread of positions eliminated. In Washington, 670 software development engineers lost their jobs (the largest category of job cuts), and in California, that number is 558. In total, a whopping 1,228 software development engineers were out of work in one day of layoffs.
The job cuts are not unique to one site or to one job category. Rather, what occurred was a trimming across many different departments. It’s as if corporate decided to sacrifice one or a handful of members of each team to keep everyone else on their toes. This suggests that when Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says that the cuts are about “culture,” he might be telling the truth. Amazon really takes its “world’s largest start-up” schtick seriously, and that means making sure everyone’s grinding like it’s “day one.”
Certainly, an AI doomer can look at the distributed nature of the cuts and see the new tools at work. Teams that once had five people can now have four, plus Claude Code or something similar. Perhaps there’s some of that going on, but my hunch is that something much less technologically advanced is afoot. Perhaps even more than the 2022–23 cuts, which took place after a dizzying hiring spree, I would pin these new cuts primarily on Amazon’s brutal corporate culture.
Amazon, the Largest User of H-1B Visas
However, to fully understand Amazon’s mass layoffs, we also need to consider another important component: the company’s use of the H-1B visa program. This is the program that allows employers to bring skilled workers to the United States from other countries for jobs that involve “theoretical and practical application of a body of highly specialized knowledge.”
Amazon is by far the country’s largest user of this program. In fiscal year (FY) 2025, the company had 13,265 beneficiaries approved, more than double that of Meta, the program’s second-largest user. Those approvals are for new workers, renewals, and transfers from other companies. But since H-1Bs are approved for about three years at a time, many existing H-1B workers at Amazon aren’t included in this number. As the company’s FY2024 number was 9,256, and its FY2023 number was 11,298, it would stand to reason that Amazon has about 33,819 H-1B workers in the United States at present — mostly, though not exclusively, corporate workers, making them about 11 percent of the corporate Amazon workforce.
There are various sources of H-1B data, one of which is the Department of Labor’s Labor Condition Application (LCA) data. Filing an LCA is a prerequisite for filing an I-129 petition for a specific worker. The LCA is typically rubber-stamped and specifies many more workers than will actually be petitioned for. The I-129 data can be accessed through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, but between the backlog from the government shutdown and how long it often takes to fulfill FOIA requests, I won’t have that data for a while. But I thought it might nonetheless be revealing to match the LCA data to the WARN data by worksite. This would allow us to at least divine Amazon’s intentions, if not their actual practices.
Again, Amazon announced layoffs for 2,303 people in Washington at the end of October. Looking at the LCA data for Q1–Q3 FY2025, i.e., Labor Condition Applications for workers who would start mostly around the beginning of October 2025, Amazon filed such applications for 8,508 potential “new employment” H-1B workers in the state of Washington. We don’t have the Q4 data yet (probably because of the shutdown), so let’s take this to be three-fourths of the LCAs the company will file in FY2025, bringing the total to 11,344 potential new H-1B positions just for workers in the state of Washington.
In FY2023, Amazon filed 11,615 I-129 petitions for all states and got 3,828 new H-1B workers approved — about a 33 percent conversion rate. If they used all of their potential LCA application–approved positions in FY2025, they could maybe have netted 3,833 new H-1B workers to start in Washington alone in October 2025 — just before the layoffs kicked in at the end of the month.
This is all to say that whatever else the layoffs were about, Amazon had the capacity to more than fill vacant positions with new H-1B workers.
The 2022–23 Amazon Layoffs in California
The LCA is not a great metric for judging actual worker displacement, and we won’t be able to access the numbers to determine what actually happened recently for a while. What we can do, however, is to look back to Amazon’s 2022–23 layoffs and get very specific about the numbers, locations, and job titles of workers laid off alongside those of actual new H-1B workers who started at Amazon just before the layoffs occurred. I was only able to do this for the state of California (Amazon’s second-largest corporate workforce concentration after Washington), as I can’t seem to get access to the ’22–’23 Washington WARN Notice with job title breakdown just yet.
Bloomberg helpfully linked I-129 data from FY2021–24 by LCA case identifiers to the LCA data here, and the following analysis is based on that data in addition to the California WARN job title data from the 2022–23 Amazon layoffs (which again I had to file a public records request for). Here’s the spreadsheet I came up with combining those two (note: I took out all distribution network–specific layoffs or hires from this data, so these are all corporate workers).
What the results suggest is that Amazon laid off workers in 2022–23 in numbers and job titles that closely match those of new H-1B workers who started at the company just before the layoffs were announced.
Between November 2022 and January 2023, WARN notices were issued in California for a total of 767 Amazon corporate workers across nineteen worksites. Around October 2022, 508 new H-1B workers started working in the state for Amazon. So, put another way, in one month 508 H-1B workers start working in California, and a month later they begin laying off 767 corporate workers in the same state. Since I have the macro data for Washington too, there 2,126 new H-1B workers started around October 2022, and the next month they began laying off 2,320 workers.
Amazon uses H-1Bs for many categories of workers, but the primary one is, again, software development engineers. The job title data is a bit shaky in the Bloomberg dataset, but where job titles are missing, they at least include the particular worker’s field of study. Two hundred twenty-seven known new software development engineers on H-1B visas started their three-year term in October 2022 in California, and an additional sixty-eight graduates in computer science or computer engineering (in all likelihood software development engineers) started then, too. A month later, Amazon laid off 274 software development engineers in the state.
To repeat: roughly 295 software development engineers on H-1B’s started working for Amazon in California in October 2022, and 274 other ones in the same state were laid off a month to three months later.
You can do this for other job categories too, though the numbers are much lower. Forty-three applied scientists on H-1Bs started working for Amazon in California in October 2022, and thirty-eight applied scientists in the state were let go a month to three months later.
So is Amazon’s use of the H-1B program causing layoffs? That might be an overstatement. If Amazon had no access to foreign workers, they would still have the same cutthroat corporate culture, and perhaps there’s a small bit of AI displacement at work here, too.
What we can say — at least, if the recent round of layoffs and H-1B hirings looks anything like 2022–23 — is that the H-1B program is enabling these layoffs.
The scrutiny that the H-1B program is getting from the Senate is thus well deserved, and a more comprehensive study of the current round of layoffs, at Amazon and elsewhere, is needed to determine the precise relation between new H-1B workers and mass layoffs. AI displacement is coming, no doubt, but in the meantime employers have plenty of other means of disciplining labor at their disposal.