Amazon is warning employees not to use third-party generative AI tools for work, according to multiple internal guidances viewed by Business Insider.
“While we may find ourselves using GenAl tools, especially when it seems to make life easier, we should be sure not to use it for confidential Amazon work,” the company warned employees in a recent email. “Don’t share any confidential Amazon, customer, or employee data when you’re using 3rd party GenAl tools. Generally, confidential data would be data that is not publicly available.”
Amazon’s internal third-party generative AI use and interaction policy, viewed by BI, warns that the companies offering generative AI services may take a license to or ownership over anything employees input into tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“This means that any outputs such as email, PRFAQs, internal wiki pages, code, confidential information, documentation, pre-launch and strategy materials may be extracted, reviewed, used, and distributed by the owners of the generative Al,” the policy states. “As such, all Amazonians must abide by our standard Amazon policies for confidential information and security for any inputs to generative Al.”
Those companies might also claim the rights to anything their models output, according to the policy.
Around this time last year, an Amazon corporate lawyer informally warned employees not to provide OpenAI’s ChatGPT with “any Amazon confidential information (including Amazon code you are working on,” saying there had been instances of ChatGPT responses looking similar to internal Amazon data. Amazon employees at the time said they were already using the AI tool as a software “coding assistant,” according to internal messages.
Questions about how generative AI companies handle confidential information, and who owns the information that goes in and comes out of a model, largely remain unresolved as these tools become more ubiquitous. Amazon may be particularly sensitive as its main competitor Microsoft invested heavily in OpenAI and has its own generative AI products.
Amazon notoriously kept employees off of Microsoft systems, but it has softened on that lately. The company recently signed a $1 billion, five-year deal for Microsoft 365 licenses, as BI previously reported.
Amazon’s internal generative AI policy states employees can use third-party models for work if they obtain director and legal approval and comply with any applicable security reviews. The recent email states some employees have access to Amazon’s internal tool Bedrock, “a more secure alternative.”
Amazon’s spokesperson Adam Montgomery said the company has been developing generative AI and large machine learning models for a long time and employees use its AI models every day.
“We have safeguards in place for employee use of these technologies, including guidance on accessing third-party generative AI services and protecting confidential information,” Montgomery said.
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