Amazon is slashing about 16,000 corporate jobs in the second round of mass layoffs for the ecommerce company in three months.

The tech giant has said it plans to use generative artificial intelligence to replace corporate workers. It has also been reducing a workforce that swelled during the pandemic.

Beth Galetti, a senior vice president at Amazon, said in a blog post Wednesday that the company has been “reducing layers, increasing ownership, and removing bureaucracy.”

The company did not say what business units would be impacted, or where the job cuts would occur.

The latest reductions follow a round of job cuts in October, when Amazon said it was laying off 14,000 workers. While some Amazon units completed those “organizational changes” in October, others did not finish until now, Galetti said.

She said U.S.-based staff would be given 90 days to look for a new role internally. Those who are unsuccessful or don’t want a new job will be offered severance pay, outplacement services and health insurance benefits, she said.

“While we’re making these changes, we’ll also continue hiring and investing in strategic areas and functions that are critical to our future,” Galetti said.

CEO Andy Jassy, who has aggressively cut costs since succeeding founder Jeff Bezos in 2021, said in June that he anticipated generative AI would reduce Amazon’s corporate workforce in the next few years.

The layoffs announced Wednesday are Amazon’s biggest since 2023, when the company cut 27,000 jobs.

Meanwhile, Amazon and other Big Tech and retail companies have cut thousands of jobs to bring spending back in line following the COVID-19 pandemic. Amazon’s workforce doubled as millions stayed home and boosted online spending.

The job cuts have not arrived with a company on shaky financial ground.

In its most recent quarter, Amazon’s profits jumped nearly 40% to about $21 billion and revenue soared to more than $180 billion.

Late last year after layoffs, Jassy said job cuts weren’t driven by company finances or AI.

“It’s culture,” he said in October. “And if you grow as fast as we did for several years, the size of businesses, the number of people, the number of locations, the types of businesses you’re in, you end up with a lot more people than what you had before, and you end up with a lot more layers.”

Hiring has stagnated in the U.S. and in December, the country added a meager 50,000 jobs, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November.

Labor data points to a reluctance by businesses to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.

While economists have described the labor situation in the U.S as a “no hire-no fire” environment, some companies have said they are cutting back on jobs, even this week.

On Tuesday, UPS said it planned to cut up to 30,000 operational jobs through attrition and buyouts this year as the package delivery company reduces the number of shipments from what was its largest customer, Amazon.

That followed 34,000 job cuts in October at UPS and the closing of daily operations at 93 leased and owned buildings during the first nine months of last year.

Also on Tuesday, Pinterest said it plans to lay off under 15% of its workforce, as part of broader restructuring that arrives as the image-sharing platform pivots more of its money to artificial intelligence.

Shares of Amazon Inc., based in Seattle, rose slightly before the opening bell Wednesday.

Prominent Republicans and gun rights advocates helped elicit a White House turnabout this week after bristling over the administration’s characterization of Alex Pretti, the second person killed this month by a federal officer in Minneapolis, as responsible for his own death because he lawfully possessed a weapon.

The death produced no clear shifts in U.S. gun politics or policies, even as President Donald Trump shuffles the lieutenants in charge of his militarized immigration crackdown. But important voices in Trump’s coalition have called for a thorough investigation of Pretti’s death while also criticizing inconsistencies in some Republicans’ Second Amendment stances.

If the dynamic persists, it could give Republicans problems as Trump heads into a midterm election year with voters already growing skeptical of his overall immigration approach. The concern is acute enough that Trump’s top spokeswoman sought Monday to reassert his brand as a staunch gun rights supporter.

“The president supports the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding American citizens, absolutely,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters.

Leavitt qualified that “when you are bearing arms and confronted by law enforcement, you are raising … the risk of force being used against you.”

That still marked a retreat from the administration’s previous messages about the shooting of Pretti. It came the same day the president dispatched border czar Tom Homan to Minnesota, seemingly elevating him over Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino, who had been in charge in Minneapolis.

Within hours of Pretti’s death on Saturday, Bovino suggested Pretti “wanted to … massacre law enforcement,” and Noem said Pretti was “brandishing” a weapon and acted “violently” toward officers.

“I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” Noem said.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, an architect of Trump’s mass deportation effort, went further on X, declaring Pretti “an assassin.”

Bystander videos contradicted each claim, instead showing Pretti holding a cellphone and helping a woman who had been pepper sprayed by a federal officer. Within seconds, Pretti was sprayed, too, and taken to the ground by multiple officers. No video disclosed thus far has shown him unholstering his concealed weapon -– which he had a Minnesota permit to carry. It appeared that one officer took Pretti’s gun and walked away with it just before shots began.

Republican lawmakers are poised to grill former Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on Thursday at a congressional hearing that’s expected to focus fresh attention on two criminal investigations that shadowed Donald Trump during his 2024 presidential campaign.

Smith testified behind closed doors last month but returns to the House Judiciary Committee for a public hearing likely to divide along starkly partisan lines between Republican lawmakers looking to undermine the former Justice Department official and Democrats hoping to elicit new and damaging testimony about Trump’s conduct.

Smith will tell lawmakers that he stands behind his decision as special counsel to bring charges against Trump in separate cases accusing the Republican of conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden and hoarding classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

“Our investigation developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in criminal activity,” Smith will say, according to a copy of his opening statement obtained by The Associated Press. “If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether that president was a Republican or a Democrat.”

“No one should be above the law in our country, and the law required that he be held to account. So that is what I did,” Smith will say.

The hearing is unfolding against the backdrop of an ongoing Trump administration retribution campaign targeting the investigators who scrutinized the Republican president. The Justice Department has fired lawyers and other employees who worked with Smith, and an independent watchdog agency responsible for enforcing a law against partisan political activity by federal employees said last summer that it had opened an investigation into him.

“In my opinion, these people are the best of public servants, our country owes them a debt of gratitude, and we are all less safe because many of these experienced and dedicated law enforcement professionals have been fired,” Smith said of the terminated members of his team.

Smith was appointed in 2022 by Biden’s Justice Department to oversee investigations into Trump. Both investigations produced indictments against Trump, but the cases were abandoned by Smith and his team after Trump won back the White House because of longstanding Justice Department legal opinions that say sitting presidents cannot be indicted.

The hearing will be led by Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, who told reporters on Wednesday that he regards Smith’s investigations as the “culmination of that whole effort to stop President Trump from getting to the White House.”

“Tomorrow he’ll be there in a public setting so the country can see that this was no different than all the other lawfare weaponization of government going after President Trump,” Jordan said, advancing a frequent talking point from Trump, who pleaded not guilty in both cases and denied wrongdoing.

At the private deposition last month, Smith vigorously rejected Republican suggestions that his investigation was motivated by politics or was meant to derail Trump’s presidential candidacy. He said the evidence placed Trump’s actions squarely at the heart of a criminal conspiracy to undo the election he lost to Biden as well as the Jan. 6, 2021, riot by a mob of his supporters at the U.S. Capitol.

“The evidence here made clear that President Trump was by a large measure the most culpable and most responsible person in this conspiracy,” Smith said. “These crimes were committed for his benefit. The attack that happened at the Capitol, part of this case, does not happen without him. The other co-conspirators were doing this for his benefit.”

Smith is also expected to face questions about his team’s analysis of phone records belonging to more than half a dozen Republican members of Congress who were in touch with the president on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021. The records contained data about the participants on the calls and how long they lasted but not their contents.

It is unlikely that Smith will share new information Thursday about his classified documents investigation. A report his team prepared on its findings remains sealed by order of a Trump-appointed judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, and Trump’s lawyers this week asked the court to permanently block its release.