When AI Breaks Things

Welcome to the tech brew ride home for Friday, 02/20/2026. I'm Brian McCullough. Today, when your AI bot breaks your operations, even when you're AWS, More on OpenAI's hardware plans, and, hey, remember perplexity? What's up with them? Is Uber roadkill in the self driving car horse race? And, of course, the weekend long range suggestions. Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Sources say Amazon's AI tools have caused at least two AWS outages, including a thirteen hour disruption in December after Kiro AI deleted and recreated an environment, quoting the Feet. Amazon Web Services experienced a thirteen hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid December after engineers allowed its Kiro AI coding tool to make certain changes according to four people familiar with the matter. The people said the agentic tool, which can take autonomous actions on behalf of users, determined that the best course of action was to delete and recreate the environment. Amazon posted an internal postmortem about the outage of the AWS system, which lets customers explore the cost of its services. Multiple Amazon employees told the FD that this was the second occasion in recent months in which one of the group's AI tools had been at the center of a service disruption. We've already seen at least two production outages in the past few months, said one senior AWS employee. The engineers let the AI agent resolve an issue without intervention. The outages were small but entirely foreseeable. AWS, which accounts for 60% of Amazon's operating profits, is seeking to build and deploy AI tools, including agents capable of taking actions independently based on human instructions. Like many big tech companies, it is seeking to sell this technology to outside customers. The incidents highlight the risk that these nascent AI tools can misbehave and cause disruptions. Amazon said it was a coincidence that AI tools were involved and that the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action, end quote. A US grand jury has indicted two former Google engineers and one of their husbands for allegedly stealing trade secrets relating to the Tensor chip for Pixel phones, quoting Bloomberg. The three, all Iranian nationals, were charged in a US indictment unsealed Thursday on 14 felony counts of conspiracy and theft of trade secrets and destroying evidence. Samana Ghandali, 41, was a hardware engineer at Google and Silicon Valley and her sister, Saroor Ghandali, 32, was an intern before they both joined another tech firm. Samena's husband, Mohammad Javed Khosravi, 40, applied multiple times at Google but was not hired and worked for a third tech company. The three were arrested Thursday and made initial appearances in federal court in San Jose, California. The justice department said in a statement, if convicted on the most serious charges, they could be sentenced to at least twenty years in prison according to the statement. We have enhanced safeguards to protect our confidential information and immediately …