Following incidents linked to AI coding tools — including a nearly six-hour shutdown of Amazon’s shopping site and a 13-hour AWS disruption caused by an AI tool that deleted and recreated a production environment — the company is now requiring senior engineers to sign off on any AI-assisted changes made by junior and mid-level staff. A senior VP called out “Gen-AI assisted changes” and the lack of established best practices as key contributing factors to the recent “trend of incidents.”
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The Amazon logo at the entrance of a logistics center in France, July 2019. Credit: Denis Charlet | AFP | Getty

Alexey Zerkalenkov

Amazon is implementing a new policy requiring senior engineers to review and approve any AI-assisted code changes made by junior and mid-level engineers. This follows two major incidents: a nearly six-hour outage of Amazon's shopping site and a 13-hour AWS disruption caused by an AI tool that deleted and recreated a production environment. A senior VP cited 'Gen-AI assisted changes' and the absence of established best practices as key factors behind a recent trend of incidents.

After outages, Amazon to make senior engineers sign off on AI-assisted changes