Robots could soon overtake human workers at Amazon.com Inc.: The company has reached a major milestone in its automation push, expanding its warehouse robot fleet to more than 1 million machines.

But while the e-commerce giant touts technological advances in speeding up deliveries and enhancing employee safety, union leaders, independent researchers, and internal documents suggest the rapid rise of workplace robotics is creating new physical strains and long-term risks for its 1.5-million human employees.

The corporate giant now operates the largest fleet of industrial robots in the world, deploying automated floor loaders, sorting machines, and multi-jointed mechanical arms across its logistics network. Amazon executives argue that mechanization removes the physical burden of heavy lifting and repetitive labor from its global workforce.

“Each step of the way, [we are] tackling a hard or deep set of technical challenges,” Scott Dresser, vice president of Amazon Robotics, told Ars Technia, highlighting the company’s efforts to automate high-risk tasks and upskill workers for higher-paying technical roles.

Safety metrics have improved alongside its robotics expansion, with its Global Recordable Incident Rate falling 43% and its Global Lost Time Incident Rate decreasing 70% since 2019, Amazon said.

However, labor groups and academic researchers paint a far more complex picture of life inside automated fulfillment centers. While heavy structural injuries have decreased, study findings indicate that collaborative robots — which work side-by-side with humans — are fundamentally altering the physical rhythm of the warehouse.

“For the last 100 years, most of the automation that we’ve seen usually happens away from workers,” said Brad Greenwood, a business professor at George Mason University and co-author of a recent academic study on warehouse automation. “The rise of collaborative robots really changes that dynamic… the robot has the ability to dictate the pace of work.”

Greenwood’s research revealed that while Amazon’s automated warehouses experienced a 40% drop in severe injuries compared to traditional facilities, less severe injuries caused by repetitive strain and fast-paced motion increased by 77%. Labor advocates argue that high productivity targets set by automated systems force employees to perform repetitive tasks at an unsustainable speed.

“Amazon likes to talk about its latest robots because it doesn’t want to talk about the tens of thousands of Amazon workers who are injured every year due to Amazon’s obsession with maximizing speed and minimizing costs,” said Joan Moriarty, director of strategic research at the Strategic Organizing Center, a coalition of trade unions.

Beyond immediate safety concerns on the shop floor, the rapid expansion of the robot fleet raises broader questions about the future of employment at the company. Amazon maintains that automation has expanded its operational footprint and driven job growth, particularly in technical, engineering, and maintenance departments.

Yet, internal strategy documents leaked in late 2025 indicated that executive teams have actively projected how advanced automation could curb future workforce expansion—potentially allowing the company to reduce its projected U.S. hiring needs by hundreds of thousands of positions over the coming decade.

As Amazon continues to roll out next-generation, artificial intelligence (AI)-driven machine models designed to handle complex sorting and tactile picking, tension between workplace efficiency and labor conditions remains high. Organizers behind the Amazon Labor Union continue to advocate for stronger safety standards, framing the issue around human limits.

“We are not robots,” reads the campaign slogan accompanying the union’s proposed workplace Safety Bill of Rights, a reminder that as machines set the pace, the human cost of immediate fulfillment remains under sharp debate.