Category: 3. Business

More than 1,000 Amazon employees have signed an open letter expressing “serious concerns” about AI development, saying that the company’s “all-costs justified, warp speed” approach to the powerful technology will cause damage to “democracy, to our jobs, and to the earth.”

The letter, published on Wednesday, was signed by the Amazon workers anonymously, and comes a month after Amazon announced mass layoff plans as it increases adoption of AI in its operations.

Among the signatories are staffers in a range of positions, including engineers, product managers and warehouse associates.

Reflecting broader AI concerns across the industry, the letter was also supported by more than 2,400 workers from companies including Meta, Google, Apple and Microsoft.

The letter contains a range of demands for Amazon, concerning its impact on the workplace and the environment. Staffers are calling on the company to power all its data centers with clean energy, make sure its AI-powered products and services do not enable “violence, surveillance and mass deportation”, and form a working group comprised of non-managers “that will have significant ownership over org-level goals and how or if AI should be used in their orgs, how or if AI-related layoffs or headcount freezes are implemented, and how to mitigate or minimize the collateral effects of AI use, such as environmental impact”.

The letter was organized by employees affiliated with the advocacy group Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. One worker who was involved in drafting the letter explained that workers were compelled to speak out because of negative experiences with using AI tools in the workplace, as well as broader environmental concerns about the AI boom. The staffers, the employee said, wanted to advocate for a better way to develop, deploy and use the technology.

“I signed the letter because of leadership’s increasing emphasis on arbitrary productivity metrics and quotas, using AI as justification to push myself and my colleagues to work longer hours and push out more projects on tighter deadlines,” said a senior software engineer, who has been with the company for over a decade, and requested anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

Climate goals

The letter accuses Amazon of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI”.

Like other companies in the generative AI race, Amazon has invested heavily in building new data centers to power new tools – which are more resource intensive and demand high amounts of electricity to operate. The company plans to spend $150bn on data centers in the next 15 years, and just recently said it will invest $15bn to build data centers in northern Indiana and at least $3bn for data centers in Mississippi.

The letter claims that Amazon’s annual emissions have “grown roughly 35% since 2019”, despite the company’s promise in 2019 to achieve net zero carbon emissions by 2040. It warns many of Amazon’s investments in AI infrastructure will be in “locations where their energy demands will force utility companies to keep coal plans online or build new gas plants”.

“‘AI’ is being used as a magic word that is code for less worker power, hoarding of more resources, and making an uninformed gamble on high energy demand computer chips magically saving us from climate change,” said an Amazon customer researcher, who requested anonymity out of fear of retaliation for speaking out. “If we can build a climate saving AI – that’s awesome! But that’s not what Amazon is spending billions of dollars to develop. They are investing fossil fuel energy draining data centers for AI that is intended to surveil, exploit, and squeeze every extra cent out of customers, communities, and government agencies.”

In a statement to the Guardian, Amazon spokesperson Brad Glasser pushed back on employees’ claims and pointed toward the company’s climate goals. “Not only are we the leading data center operator in efficiency, we’re the world’s largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy for five consecutive years with over 600 projects globally,” said Glasser. “We’ve also invested significantly in nuclear energy through existing plants and new SMR technology–these aren’t distractions, they’re concrete actions demonstrating real progress toward our Climate Pledge commitment to reach net-zero carbon across our global operations by 2040.”

AI for productivity

The letter also includes strict demands around the role of AI in the Amazon workplace, demands that, staffers say, arose out of challenges employees are experiencing.

Three Amazon employees who spoke to the Guardian claimed that the company is pressuring them to use AI tools for productivity, in an effort to increase output. “I’m getting messaging from my direct manager and [from] of all the way up the chain, about how I should be using AI for coding, for writing, for basically all of my day-to-day tasks, and that those will make me more efficient, and also that if I don’t get on board and use them, that I’m going to fall behind, that it’s sort of sink or swim,” said a software engineer who has been with Amazon for over two years, requesting anonymity due to fear of reprisal.

The worker added that just weeks ago she was told by her manager that they were “expected to do twice as much work because of AI tools”, and expressed concern that the output expected demanded with fewer people is unsustainable, and “the tools are just not making up that gap.”

The customer researcher echoed similar concerns. “I have both personally felt the pressure to use AI in my role, and hear from so many of my colleagues they are under the same pressure …”.

“All the while, there’s no discussion about the immediate effects on us as workers – from unprecedented layoffs to unrealistic expectations for output.”

The senior software engineer said that the adoption of AI has had imperfect outcomes. He said that most commonly, workers are pressured to adopt agentic code generation tools: “Recently I worked on a project that was just cleaning up after a high-level engineer tried to use AI to generate code to complete a complex project,” said this worker. “But none of it worked and he didn’t understand why – starting from scratch would have actually been easier.”

Amazon did not respond to questions about the staffers’ workplace critiques about AI use.

Workers emphasized they are not against AI outright, rather they want it to be developed sustainably and with input from the people building and using it. “I see Amazon using AI to justify a power grab over community resources like water and energy, but also over its own workers, who are increasingly subject to surveillance, work speedups, and implicit threats of layoffs,” said the senior software engineer. “There is a culture of fear around openly discussing the drawbacks of AI at work, and one thing the letter is setting out to accomplish is to show our colleagues that many of us feel this way and that another path is possible.”

ACD is an evolutionary conserved mechanism used by stem and progenitor cells to generate cell diversity during development and regulate tissue homeostasis in the adult. CSCs, present in many human tumors, can divide asymmetrically to generate intratumoral heterogeneity or symmetrically to expand the tumor by self-renewal. Over the past 15 years, it has been suggested that dysregulation of the balance between symmetric and ACDs in CSCs, favoring symmetric divisions, can trigger tumor progression in different types of cancer (Bajaj et al., 2015; Chao et al., 2024; Li et al., 2022), including mammary tumors (Cicalese et al., 2009; Dey-Guha et al., 2011), GBM (Chen et al., 2014), oligodendrogliomas (Sugiarto et al., 2011; Daynac et al., 2018), colorectal cancer (Bu et al., 2013; Hwang et al., 2014), and hepatocellular carcinoma (Hwang et al., 2014). Thus, it is of great relevance to get a deeper insight into the network of regulators that control ACD, as well as the mechanisms by which they operate in this key process.

Drosophila neural stem cells or NBs have been used as a paradigm for many decades to study ACD (Homem and Knoblich, 2012). NBs divide asymmetrically to give rise to another self-renewing NB and a daughter cell that will start a differentiation process. Over all these years, a complex network of ACD regulators that tightly modulate this process has been characterized. For example, the so-called cell-fate determinants, including the Notch inhibitor Numb, accumulate asymmetrically at the basal pole of mitotic NBs and are exclusively segregated to one daughter cell, promoting in this cell a differentiation process. The asymmetric distribution of cell-fate determinants in the NB is, in turn, regulated by an intricate group of proteins asymmetrically located at the apical pole of mitotic NBs, generically known as the ‘apical complex’. This apical complex includes kinases (i.e., aPKC), small GTPases (i.e., Cdc42, Rap1), and Par proteins (i.e., Par-6, Par3), among others (Homem and Knoblich, 2012).

Given the potential relevance of ACD in CSCs, we decided to take advantage of all the knowledge accumulated in Drosophila about the network of modulators that control asymmetric NB division. As a first approach, we aimed to analyze whether the levels of human homologs of known Drosophila ACD regulators were altered in human tumors. Specifically, we centered on human GBM, as the presence of CSCs (GSCs) has been shown in this tumor. The microarray we interrogated with GBM patient samples had some limitations. For example, not all the human gene homologs of the Drosophila ACD regulators were present (i.e., the human homologs of the determinant Numb). Likewise, we only tested seven different GBM patient samples. Nevertheless, the output from this analysis was enough to determine that most of the human genes tested in the array presented altered levels of expression. We selected for further analyses RAP2A, one of the human genes that showed the lowest levels of expression compared to the control samples. However, it would be interesting to analyze in the future the potential consequences that altered levels of expression of the other human homologs in the array can have in the behavior of the GSCs. In silico analyses, taking advantage of the existence of established datasets, such as the TCGA, can help to more robustly assess, in a bigger sample size, the relevance of those human genes’ expression levels in GBM progression, as we observed for the gene RAP2A.

We have previously shown that Drosophila Rap1 acts as a novel NB ACD regulator in a complex with other small GTPases and the apical regulators Canoe (Cno), aPKC, and Par-6 (Carmena et al., 2011). Here, we have shown that Drosophila Rap2l also regulates NB ACD by ensuring the correct localization of the ACD modulators Cno and Numb. We have also demonstrated that RAP2A, the human homolog of Drosophila Rap2l, behaves as an ACD regulator in GBM neurosphere cultures, and its restitution to these GBM cultures, in which it is present at low levels, targets the stemness of GSCs, increasing the number of ACDs. It would be of great interest in the future to determine the specific mechanism by which Rap2l/RAP2A is regulating this process. One possibility is that, as it occurs in the case of the Drosophila ACD regulator Rap1, Rap2l/RAP2A is physically interacting or in a complex with other relevant ACD modulators. Thus, this study supports the relevance of ACD in CSCs of human tumors to refrain the expansion of the tumor. Other studies, however, claim that ACD should be targeted in human tumors as it promotes the intratumoral heterogeneity that hampers the complete tumor loss after chemotherapy (Samanta et al., 2023; Chao et al., 2023; Hitomi et al., 2021). More investigations should be carried out with other human gene homologs of ACD regulators to further confirm the results of this study. Likewise, analyses in vivo (i.e., in mouse xenografts) would also be required to reinforce our conclusions. This would be very relevant in order to consider ACD restitution in CSCs of human tumors, what has been called ‘differentiation therapy’ (de Thé, 2018), as a potential alternative therapeutic treatment.

The Pakistan Stock Exchange (PSX) wrapped up Friday, November 28, 2025, with robust gains, as the KSE-100 Index rose 1,304 points, or 0.99%, to close at 166,678. The session began on a positive note and held steady, propelled by significant institutional purchases amid reports of the Prime Minister ordering the Federal Board of Revenue to slash super tax rates for big companies, which lifted market morale.

“The market opened firmly and sustained its positive trajectory throughout the session. The rally was fueled largely by institutional buying following media reports that the Prime Minister has directed the FBR to reduce the super tax rate on large corporations, boosting investor sentiment,” said Ali Najib, Deputy Head of Trading at Arif Habib Ltd.

Read: Business leaders demand policy stability away from short-term fixes

Economic indicators revealed the Sensitive Price Index increasing 4.32% year-over-year and 0.73% from the prior week ending November 27. In company developments, Ghandhara Industries (GHNI) unveiled a collaboration with China’s Zhongtong Bus Holding to launch and distribute upscale buses locally, contributing to the upbeat atmosphere.

Top-performing sectors on Friday included technology, exploration and production, power, and cement, with key contributors like Systems Limited (SYS), Pakistan Petroleum (PPL), Hub Power Company (HUBC), Oil and Gas Development Company (OGDC), and Lucky Cement (LUCK) adding a combined 609 points. Trading activity was vigorous, with 589.7 million shares exchanged, worth Rs41.9 billion; Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) led volumes at 39.1 million shares.

This Friday’s performance capped a solid week, with the index up 4,575 points overall (2.82%). Analysts foresee continued momentum, possibly testing fresh peaks, though 165,000 could provide initial support in any pullback.

The Food and Drug Administration is poised to kill a proposed rule that would require testing for toxic asbestos in talc-based cosmetics, a problem that has been linked to cancer.

Talc is widely used, including in cosmetics, food, medication and personal care products. The order was signed by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, leader of the “Make America healthy again” (Maha) movement.

A stated cornerstone of the movement, which helped propel Donald Trump to office, is to help eliminate toxins like asbestos from food, medicine and personal care products. The move has shocked health campaigners

“Nothing could make America less healthy than having a cancer causing product in cosmetics,” said Scott Faber, vice-president of government affairs with the Environmental Working Group non-profit, which has lobbied for stricter regulations around talc. “It’s hard to understand why we would revoke a rule that simply requires companies to test for asbestos.”

The FDA did not immediately post a press release announcing the move, and did not immediately respond to a request for comment. But in a legal notice posted to the federal registry, the agency wrote that the decision was in response to comments it received about potential “unintended consequences” for companies that produce drugs, which suggests drugmakers were opposed to testing.

“Good cause exists to withdraw the proposed rule at this time,” the notice states.

Asbestos is a group of six naturally occurring fibrous minerals used to make products resist heat, fire and electricity. No safe level of exposure is considered safe, and it is banned in more than 50 countries. The substance is a known human carcinogen linked to an estimated 40,000 deaths annually.

Cosmetic companies have known since the 1950s that talc can be contaminated with asbestos, Faber said, but the public was not alerted in the early 1970s. Despite this, the industry persuaded the FDA to allow companies to rely on testing methods that can detect some, but not all, asbestos fibers.

Asbestos contamination has been regularly found in some talc-based cosmetics, including baby powder, which was disproportionately used by Black women. Personal care giant Johnson & Johnson discontinued US talc-based baby powder sales in 2020 amid mounting public pressure and nearly 38,000 lawsuits.

The company has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements, and proposed another $6.5bn settlement for a class lawsuit alleging that it knowingly poisoned consumers. About 3,000 women in the UK last month took a case to the nation’s high court that alleges Johnson & Johnson poisoned them.

Despite its high toxicity, clear dangers and widespread use, regulating it has been a tortuous process. An initial 1989 EPA ban on its use in most products was quickly overturned by a court, and efforts to pass similar bans have failed over the decades.

Joe Biden’s EPA proposed a ban that was finalized late last year, but the Trump administration moved to withdraw it before reversing course in July.

The Cosmetics Modernization Act of 2022 included provisions that requires testing of talc-based cosmetics. The Biden administration began implementing the rule, but the Trump administration is now poised to kill it.

In its notice, the FDA said it was acting on Maha priorities in a complex area: “We are withdrawing the proposed rule to reconsider best means of addressing the issues covered by the proposed rule and broader principles to reduce exposure to asbestos, and to ensure that any standardized testing method requirements for detecting asbestos in talc-containing cosmetic products help protect users of talc-containing cosmetic products from harmful exposure to asbestos.”

Referring to RFK Jr, Faber said: “It’s tragic that a person who has used most of his career to protect people from cancer doing this.”

As the holiday season looms into view with Black Friday, one category on people’s gift lists is causing increasing concern: products with artificial intelligence.

The development has raised new concerns about the dangers smart toys could pose to children, as consumer advocacy groups say AI could harm kids’ safety and development. The trend has prompted calls for increased testing of such products and governmental oversight.

“If we look into how these toys are marketed and how they perform and the fact that there is little to no research that shows that they are beneficial for children – and no regulation of AI toys – it raises a really big red flag,” said Rachel Franz, director of Young Children Thrive Offline, an initiative from Fairplay, which works to protect children from big tech.

Last week, those fears were given brutal justification when an AI-equipped teddy bear started discussing sexually explicit topics.

The product, FoloToy’s Kumma, ran on an OpenAI model and responded to questions about kink. It suggested bondage and roleplay as ways to enhance a relationship, according to a report from the Public Interest Research Group (Pirg), the consumer protection organization behind the study.

“It took very little effort to get it to go into all kinds of sexually sensitive topics and probably a lot of content that parents would not want their children to be exposed to,” said Teresa Murray, Pirg consumer watchdog director.

Products like the teddy bear are part of a global smart-toy market valued at $16.7bn in 2023, according to Allied Market Research.

The industry is particularly big in China, which has more than 1,500 AI toy companies, which are working to expand abroad, MIT Technology Review reports.

In addition to the Shanghai-based startup FoloToy, Curio, a California-based company, works with OpenAI and makes a stuffed toy, Grok, as in Elon Musk’s chatbot, voiced by the musician Grimes. In June, Mattel, which owns brands like Barbie and Hot Wheels, also announced a partnership with OpenAI to “support AI-powered products and experiences”.

Before the Pirg report on the creepy teddy bear, parents, technology researchers and lawmakers had already raised concerns about the impact of bots on minors’ mental health. In October, the chatbot company Character.AI announced that it would ban users under 18 following a lawsuit alleging that its bot exacerbated a teen’s depression and caused him to kill himself.

Murray said AI toys could be particularly dangerous because whereas earlier smart toys provided children-programmed responses, a bot can “have a free-flowing conversation with a child and there are no boundaries, as we found”.

That could not only lead to sexually explicit conversations, but children could become attached to a bot rather than a person or imaginary friend, which could hurt their development, said Jacqueline Woolley, director of the Children’s Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin.

For example, a child can benefit from having a disagreement with a friend and learning how to resolve it. That is less likely to happen with bots, which are often sycophantic, said Woolley, who consulted on the Pirg study.

“I worry about inappropriate bonding,” Woolley said.

Companies also use the AI toys to collect data from children and have not been transparent about what they are doing with that information, Franz, of Fairplay, said. That potentially puts users at risk because of a lack of security around such data, Franz said. Hackers have been able to take control of AI products.

“Because of the trust that the toys engender, I would say that children are more likely to tell their deepest thoughts to these toys,” Franz said. “The surveillance is unnecessary and inappropriate.”

Despite such concerns, Pirg is not calling for a ban on AI toys, which could have educational value, like helping children learn a second language or state capitals, Murray said.

“There is nothing wrong with having some kind of educational tool, but that same educational tool isn’t telling you that it’s your best friend, that you can tell me anything,” Murray said.

The organization is calling for additional regulation of these toys for children under 13 but has not made specific policy recommendations, Murray said.

There also needs to be more independent research conducted to ensure the products are safe for children and, until that is done, they should be pulled from shelves, Franz said.

“We need short-term and longitudinal independent research on the impacts of children interacting with AI toys, including their social-emotional development” and cognitive development, Franz said.

Following the Pirg report, OpenAI announced it was suspending FoloToy. That company’s CEO then told CNN that it was pulling the bear from the market and “conducting an internal safety audit”.

On Thursday, 80 organizations, including Fairplay, issued an advisory urging families not to buy AI toys this holiday season.

“AI toys are being marketed to families as safe and even beneficial to learning before their impact has been assessed by independent research,” the release states. “By contrast, offline teddy bears and toys have been proven to benefit children’s development with none of the risks of AI toys.”

Curio, maker of the Grok toy, told the Guardian in an email that after reviewing the Pirg report, “we are actively working with our team to address any concerns, while continuously overseeing content and interactions to ensure a safe and enjoyable experience for children”.

Mattel stated that its first products with OpenAI “will focus on families and older customers” and that “use of OpenAI APIs is not intended for users under 13”.

“AI complements–not replaces–traditional play, and we are emphasizing safety, privacy, creativity and responsible innovation,” the company stated.

Franz referred to past privacy concerns with Mattel’s smart products and said: “It’s good that Mattel is claiming that their AI products are not for young kids, but if we look at who plays with toys and who toys are marketed to, it’s young children.”

Franz added: “We’re very interested in learning the concrete steps Mattel will take to ensure their OpenAI products are not actually used by kids who will surely recognize and be attracted to the brands.”

The Pakistani rupee (PKR) closed in green against the US Dollar (USD) 46th day in a row on Friday.

Meanwhile, it posted losses against most of the other major currencies during today’s session.

The PKR barely appreciated by 0.001 percent DoD and closed at 280.55 against the US Dollar today.

On a fiscal year-to-date basis (FYTD), the PKR has gained 1.16 percent against the US Dollar.

Other currencies

The PKR was green against most of the other major currencies in the interbank market today.

It was green against the UAE Dirham (AED) and Saudi Riyal (SAR).

Meanwhile, it lost two paisas against the Canadian Dollar (CAD).

The rupee gained 11 paisas against the Australian Dollar (AUD) in today’s interbank currency market.

Currency	26-Nov 2025	27-Nov 2025	28-Nov 2025	Change +/–
USD	280.5609	280.5537	280.5231	0.0306
EUR	324.8054	325.1197	324.6915	0.4282
GBP	369.8915	371.1445	370.6131	0.5314
AUD	182.4207	183.1174	182.9993	0.1181
MYR	67.8585	67.9143	67.9068	0.0075
CNY	39.6303	39.6173	39.6337	0.0164
CAD	199.3682	199.8317	199.8099	0.0218
AED	76.3972	76.3858	76.3775	0.0083
SAR	74.8023	74.7984	74.7772	0.0212

It gained 42 paisas against the Euro (EUR) and 53 paisas against the British Pound (GBP).