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Documented facts (9)
Listed by the White House among the donors funding President Donald Trump's ballroom. Individual amounts were not disclosed. The Washington Post later reported that Amazon contributed multiple millions of dollars.
The report "From economy of occupation to economy of genocide" (A/HRC/59/23) by Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, which describes Israel's campaign in Gaza as genocide, names Amazon among the companies giving Israel near government-wide access to cloud and AI technologies. It states that Israel awarded Amazon and Alphabet the $1.2 billion Project Nimbus contract in 2021, largely funded through Ministry of Defense expenditure, and that the Project Nimbus consortium supplied critical cloud and AI infrastructure when the Israeli military's internal cloud overloaded in October 2023. A 2024 +972 Magazine investigation reported that the Israeli army had stored some intelligence information collected through mass surveillance of Gaza's population on servers managed by Amazon Web Services.
“Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon grant Israel virtually government-wide access to their cloud and artificial intelligence technologies, enhancing data processing, decision-making and surveillance and analysis capacities.”
Response: Asked by +972 Magazine, AWS said it was "focused on making the benefits of our world-leading cloud technology available to all our customers". Israel called the report politically motivated and legally baseless.
- Jeff Bezosvia Twitch Interactive (subsidiary of) → Amazon (founded by)· 26 Feb 2025Attacks on press & justice
As owner of The Washington Post, announced that its opinion section would write every day in defense of "personal liberties and free markets" and leave opposing viewpoints to other publications. Opinions editor David Shipley resigned rather than oversee the change.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We'll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Announced it had licensed a documentary about incoming first lady Melania Trump, who served as executive producer, in a deal reported at about $40 million, shortly after Jeff Bezos met Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago and reports that Bezos planned to donate $1 million to his inaugural fund. Amazon reportedly spent about $35 million more promoting the film.
Response: Amazon MGM Studios said: "We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it."
Donated $1 million to Donald Trump's 2025 inaugural fund and streamed the inauguration on Prime Video, an in-kind donation reported as worth another $1 million.
- Jeff Bezosvia Twitch Interactive (subsidiary of) → Amazon (founded by)· 25 Oct 2024Attacks on press & justice
Blocked The Washington Post, which he owns, from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris that the editorial board had drafted, less than two weeks before the 2024 presidential election. The paper announced it would no longer endorse presidential candidates; more than 200,000 subscriptions were cancelled and editorial board members resigned.
Response: In an opinion piece in the Post, Bezos said ending endorsements was meant to avoid a "perception of bias", wrote "No quid pro quo of any kind is at work here", and acknowledged the timing was "inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy".
Disabled ratings, comments and reviews for Xi Jinping's book "The Governance of China" on its Chinese site, Amazon.cn, around 2019 in response to an edict from Beijing triggered by reviews below five stars, according to a December 2021 Reuters investigation.
Response: Amazon said it "complies with all applicable laws and regulations, wherever we operate, and China is no exception".
Amazon Web Services sales staff pitched the Rekognition facial recognition service to ICE's Homeland Security Investigations unit at a June 2018 meeting, according to emails obtained by the Project on Government Oversight. An AWS employee wrote that the company was "ready and willing to support the vital HSI mission".
Response: AWS said Rekognition was discussed at technology "boot camps" and that it followed up with interested customers, ICE being one of them. ICE said it had no contract to buy Rekognition.
Public records released by the ACLU showed Amazon marketing its Rekognition facial recognition service to police and helping deploy it: the Washington County Sheriff's Office in Oregon built an app to check images against about 300,000 booking photos, and Orlando police piloted real-time detection of "persons of interest" from city cameras.
Response: Amazon said it "requires that customers comply with the law and be responsible when they use" its services.