NLPC presented a shareholder proposal today at Amazon‘s 2025 annual meeting of shareholders that asked the company to report on its AI data privacy efforts. NLPC warned that Amazon’s history of data ethics violations could torpedo its AI initiatives. Instead, NLPC argues the company should focus on privacy to differentiate from competitors such as Microsoft or Meta.
The company’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on pages 58-60 of its 2025 proxy statement. NLPC’s response to the board’s opposition statement was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission last month.
Presenting the proposal at the meeting was Luke Perlot, associate director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. An audio recording of his presentation can be found here, and a transcript of his three-minute remarks follows:
Good morning,
Artificial intelligence is reshaping every corner of Amazon’s business – from Alexa and Ring to AWS and the Company’s new Bedrock and Q offerings – but AI is only as trustworthy as the data that trains it.
While Amazon’s competitors are focused on developing consumer-oriented AI models, Amazon’s focus has been on internal development.
That is where Amazon faces a material, self-inflicted risk. Internal security leaders had previously warned that the Company’s customer data had become too expansive an unwieldy for the security division to map.
Alexa voice snippets have been shared with dozens of advertising partners, and confidential enterprise data leaked during the preview of the Q chatbot.
These lapses reveal a pattern: Amazon builds powerful AI behind closed doors, while the public, regulators, and investors remain in the dark about where its training data comes from and how securely it is handled.
Competitors such as Microsoft, Google, and Meta are already battling lawsuits over data scraping and copyright infringement.
If Amazon ignores the warning signs, the Company could encounter the same litigation, regulatory fines, and consumer backlash – threatening the very trust that underpins Amazon’s two trillion-dollar valuation.
Our proposal is simple: publish an annual, board-level report that (1) identifies the operational and financial risks created by unethical or illegal data sourcing for AI; (2) details the safeguards Amazon employs to prevent those abuses; and (3) explains how the Company measures their effectiveness.
Privacy-centric companies win customer loyalty; those that violate it lose in court and in the marketplace.
For these reasons, I urge shareholders to vote FOR Item 11, we can ensure Amazon’s leadership in AI is matched by leadership in data ethics.
Thank you.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for the Amazon annual meeting here.
Listen to Luke Perlot’s presentation of the proposal at the meeting here.
Read NLPC’s response, filed with the SEC, to the company’s opposition to our shareholder proposal, here.
