An internal Amazon document warns that AI is accelerating tool duplication inside the company faster than teams can clean it up

An internal Amazon document obtained by Business Insider states that AI “dramatically lowers the barrier to building new tools,” allowing engineering teams to spin up overlapping systems quickly while also reducing the pressure to retire redundant ones, creating what the document calls an accelerating duplication problem across Amazon's retail business. The issue extends beyond tool sprawl to data integrity, as AI systems that ingest and transform internal data create derived copies that can persist even after the original source is deleted or restricted, with one internal system called Spec Studio caught surfacing private code details after access was revoked. Amazon's proposed solution is to use AI to identify duplicate tools and nudge teams to consolidate, though the company's longstanding culture of autonomous “two-pizza teams” moving independently may make the problem structurally difficult to solve.