Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is going to lead to unprecedented productivity gains which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes. Internally, Amazon employees mock the company’s AI tools, refer to its output as “slop,” and joke about the company’s failed attempt to motivate employees to use AI tools effectively. 

The memes are yet another example of the contrast between what AI companies say in public about its potential power and benefit versus the reality of how the people who help create these AI tools use and criticize them internally. Amazon employees told me about these memes after they saw my story last week about Google employees also internally sharing memes critical of Google’s AI tools. 

“Now I have everything I need,” says the text over an image of a jet taking off in one meme posted by an Amazon employee. The jet is edited to carry the purple ghost logo for Kiro, Amazon’s AI-powered coding tool. “Narrator: He did not have everything he needed,” says the text over an image of a bunch of people left behind on the tarmac. I’ve recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources.

“Kiro: ‘Confirmed I have the full picture,’” says the text over an image of an iceberg that appears small above water but is hiding a huge mass underwater in another meme posted by an Amazon employee. 

One meme just showed Kiro’s logo, as well as an image of a bee and a lion implying that Kiro be lyin’.

Another meme just shows Cillian Murphy’s face as Robert Oppenheimer in the movie Oppenheimer, surrounded by logos of AI coding tools like Amazon’s Kiro, Anthropic’s Claude Code, and an AI agent called Meshclaw. The text on the image simply reads “Sloppenheimer.” The meme apparently refers to the fact that Amazon employees have been encouraged to use all of these tools at some point. 

For this story, I talked to multiple Amazon employees who asked to remain anonymous because they were not authorized to speak to the press. They said that this discussion is mostly taking place on a company Slack channel called #actual-aws-memes. While most of the memes I saw were critical of AI, one Amazon employee told me that there’s a “spectrum” of opinions shared in the channel. 

“Actual-aws-memes is a place to blow off steam so it skews negative, but I’d say the genres of most are ‘Oh boy, we get to use Claude Code now instead of Kiro,’ ‘Earnest Kiro user complaining about its limitations,’ and some genuine frustration with corporate policy,” The Amazon employee told me. “I’m an AI hater, so I prefer to think they agree with me, but there’s more of a spectrum than that.”

Another Amazon employee told me that the anti-AI memes started around the end of 2024 and the start of 2025, “when [AI] adoption started to get really forced by leadership.”

“I think people meme about anything they’re around a lot, and obviously AI is a common topic,” Another Amazon employee told me. “Of course it doesn’t help that leadership is definitely pushing AI so there’s probably some element of backlash.”

A few of the recent memes shared in the channel directly reference the fact that Amazon had just shut down an internal leaderboard which tracked how much Amazon employees were using Kiro. In an official internal statement and in comment to 404 Media, Amazon said it had shut down the leaderboard because it had achieved its goal of motivating and teaching people to use AI tools. However, Amazon employees told 404 Media that management decided to shut down the leaderboard because people were cheating by tasking Kiro with completing unnecessary tasks and because it was resulting in wasteful, expensive AI use. 

“When they shut down the leaderboard, there was a lot of [discussion in the slack channel] ‘Well, yeah, what did you think was going to happen when you incentivized people to drive up usage,’” the Amazon employee told me. 

One Amazon employee shared an image of the “stonks” going down meme and said “AI usage after the PTI incentives goes away.”

One Amazon employee shared a fake certificate for a “participation award” to AWS and Goodhart’s Law for “cheesing a leaderboard we probably should have known you would cheese.” Goodhart’s law is the adage that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure,” which is what some Amazon employees thought was the effect of the leaderboard. Amazon measured and rewarded AI use, so employees used a lot of AI, but not in a way that produced any value. 

Another meme referencing the leaderboard and several Amazon AI products like Ask Rufus, Amazon Q, and Amazon Nova asked “What do you mean by ‘value?’ AI itself is the purpose for everything, no?”

One Amazon employee told me that he saw Amazon employees in the chat discussing how to cheat the leaderboard. 

“I saw some of that, mostly the occasional ‘you know, it’d be really easy to set up a shell script to do this’ or ‘my cron job that calls Kiro every hour or so.’ Hard to tell if it was actual planning or just engineers noticing how easy it would be to cheat the system,” another Amazon employee told me. 

In an email, Amazon told me that the negative AI comments on Slack are just from a few individuals and don’t represent the perspective of the company or the vast majority of employees.

“We’re always looking to understand our teams’ experiences with various tools – that’s how we learn what works for them and what doesn’t – and while this handful of comments doesn’t reflect what we hear from most Kiro users, we still appreciate the chance to learn from the feedback,” Amazon said. “In general, we’re seeing incredible improvements in efficiency and delivery from Kiro, which more than 80% of our software developers use. Kiro offers differentiated capabilities that other tools don’t provide, particularly in spec-driven development and property-based testing. These aren’t just incremental improvements—they represent a fundamentally different approach to AI-assisted development that prioritizes production readiness and correctness.”