Amazon to pay $1.9 million to migrant contract workers to settle claims of human rights abuses
Packages move along a conveyor belt at an Amazon Fulfillment center on Cyber Monday in Robbinsville, New Jersey, on Nov. 28, 2022.
Stephanie Keith | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Amazon will pay more than 700 migrant workers roughly $1.9 million to settle claims they suffered human rights abuses as a result of exploitative labor contracts in Saudi Arabia.
In a blog post Thursday, the company said it hired a third-party labor rights expert, Verité, last year to investigate conditions at two of its warehouses in Saudi Arabia. Verité identified numerous practices in violation of Amazon’s supply chain standards, the company said.
Last October, an Amnesty International report, as well as an investigation from the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism as well as The Guardian, detailed accounts of grim conditions for migrant workers at Amazon warehouses in Saudi Arabia.
Migrant workers, many of whom were Nepalese, were deceived by third-party recruiting agencies into thinking they would work directly for Amazon, and forced to pay unlawful fees to obtain employment, the Amnesty report said. While they worked at Amazon warehouses, the workers were housed in accommodations that were “overcrowded and dirty, infested with bed bugs and lacking even the most basic facilities,” Amnesty wrote. In some cases, the agencies prevented employees from changing jobs or leaving Saudi Arabia unless they paid hefty fines, which they often couldn’t afford without taking out burdensome loans.
The abuses suffered by workers were so severe that they likely amounted to “human trafficking for the purpose of labor exploitation as defined by international law and standards,” Amnesty wrote in the October report.
Amazon said it became aware of the issues before reports from groups like Amnesty. The company said Verité interviewed employees at of one of its temporary labor vendors, Abdullah Fahad Al-Mutairi Co., and found worker-paid recruitment fees, “substandard living accommodations, contract and wage irregularities, and delays in the resolution of worker complaints.”
Amazon confirmed through a series of audits in recent months that AFMCO had “remediated the most serious concerns,” including by upgrading housing accommodations.
It also “secured AFMCO’s commitment” that after workers’ employment ends at Amazon, the agency will pay them in line with their contracts and won’t move them to an accommodation that fails to meet Amazon’s standards. The report from The Guardian and other outlets detailed how workers whose contracts had ended were moved to even more squalid housing, and, lacking income, struggled to afford basic necessities such as food.
“Our goal is for all of our vendors to have management systems in place that ensure safe and healthy working conditions; this includes responsible recruitment practices,” Amazon wrote in the blog post.
Amazon’s labor record has been heavily scrutinized in recent years. Lawmakers, politicians and advocacy groups have zeroed in on its treatment of warehouse and delivery workers, arguing they’re exposed to unsafe working conditions. It faces multiple ongoing federal probes into its safety practices, and it has been fined by federal safety regulators for exposing workers to ergonomic risks in its warehouses.
Amazon has disputed regulators’ allegations, and has said it continues to invest in worker safety. It also has said it has made progress on lowering injury rates, including through introducing more automation in its facilities.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks during the Snowflake Summit in San Francisco on June 2, 2025.
Justin Sullivan | Getty Images News | Getty Images
OpenAI has been awarded a $200 million contract to provide the U.S. Defense Department with artificial intelligence tools.
The department announced the one-year contract on Monday, months after OpenAI said it would collaborate with defense technology startup Anduril to deploy advanced AI systems for “national security missions.”
“Under this award, the performer will develop prototype frontier AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges in both warfighting and enterprise domains,” the Defense Department said. It’s the first contract with OpenAI listed on the Department of Defense’s website.
Anduril received a $100 million defense contract in December. Weeks earlier, OpenAI rival Anthropic said it would work with Palantir and Amazon to supply its AI models to U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.
Sam Altman, OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said in a discussion with OpenAI board member and former National Security Agency leader Paul Nakasone at a Vanderbilt University event in April that “we have to and are proud to and really want to engage in national security areas.”
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Defense Department specified that the contract is with OpenAI Public Sector LLC, and that the work will mostly occur in the National Capital Region, which encompasses Washington, D.C., and several nearby counties in Maryland and Virginia.
Meanwhile, OpenAI is working to build additional computing power in the U.S. In January, Altman appeared alongside President Donald Trump at the White House to announce the $500 billion Stargate project to build AI infrastructure in the U.S.
The new contract will represent a small portion of revenue at OpenAI, which is generating over $10 billion in annualized sales. In March, the company announced a $40 billion financing round at a $300 billion valuation.
In April, Microsoft, which supplies cloud infrastructure to OpenAI, said the U.S. Defense Information Systems Agency has authorized the use of the Azure OpenAI service with secret classified information.
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket is shown on its launch pad carrying Amazon’s Project Kuiper internet network satellites as the vehicle is prepared for launch at the Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Cape Canaveral, Florida, U.S., April 28, 2025.
Steve Nesius | Reuters
United Launch Alliance on Monday was forced to delay the second flight carrying a batch of Amazon‘s Project Kuiper internet satellites because of a problem with the rocket booster.
With roughly 30 minutes left in the countdown, ULA announced it was scrubbing the launch due to an issue with “an elevated purge temperature” within its Atlas V rocket’s booster engine. The company said it will provide a new launch date at a later point.
“Possible issue with a GN2 purge line that cannot be resolved inside the count,” ULA CEO Tory Bruno said in a post on Bluesky. “We will need to stand down for today. We’ll sort it and be back.”
The launch from Florida’s Space Coast had been set for last Friday, but was rescheduled to Monday at 1:25 p.m. ET due to inclement weather.
Amazon in April successfully sent up 27 Kuiper internet satellites into low Earth orbit, a region of space that’s within 1,200 miles of the Earth’s surface. The second voyage will send “another 27 satellites into orbit, bringing our total constellation size to 54 satellites,” Amazon said in a blog post.
Kuiper is the latest entrant in the burgeoning satellite internet industry, which aims to beam high-speed internet to the ground from orbit. The industry is currently dominated by Elon Musk’s Space X, which operates Starlink. Other competitors include SoftBank-backed OneWeb and Viasat.
Amazon is targeting a constellation of more than 3,000 satellites. The company has to meet a Federal Communications Commission deadline to launch half of its total constellation, or 1,618 satellites, by July 2026.
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google Cloud, speaks at a cloud computing conference held by the company in 2019.
Michael Short | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google apologized for a major outage that the company said was caused by multiple layers of flawed recent updates.
The company released an incident report late on Friday that explained hours of downtime on Thursday. More than 70 Google cloud services stopped working properly across the globe, knocking down or disrupting dozens of third-party services, including Cloudflare, OpenAI and Shopify. Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Google Meet and other first-party products also malfunctioned.
“We deeply apologize for the impact this outage has had,” Google wrote in the incident report. “Google Cloud customers and their users trust their businesses to Google, and we will do better. We apologize for the impact this has had not only on our customers’ businesses and their users but also on the trust of our systems. We are committed to making improvements to help avoid outages like this moving forward.”
Thomas Kurian, CEO of Google’s cloud unit, also posted about the outage in an X post on Thursday, saying “we regret the disruption this caused our customers.”
Google in May added a new feature to its “quota policy checks” for evaluating automated incoming requests, but the new feature wasn’t immediately tested in real-world situations, the company wrote in the incident report. As a result, the company’s systems didn’t know how to properly handle data from the new feature, which included blank entries. Those blank entries were then sent out to all Google Cloud data center regions, which prompted the crashes, the company wrote.
Engineers figured out the issue in 10 minutes, according to the company. However, the entire incident went on for seven hours after that, with the crash leading to an overload in some larger regions.
As it released the feature, Google did not use feature flags, an increasingly common industry practice that allows for slow implementation to minimize impact if problems occur. Feature flags would have caught the issue before the feature became widely available, Google said.
Going forward, Google will change its architecture so if one system fails, it can still operate without crashing, the company said. Google said it will also audit all systems and improve its communications “both automated and human, so our customers get the information they need asap to react to issues.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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