Your Next Amazon Order Waives Class Actions

Introduction

Amazon deleted its mandatory arbitration clause on May 3, 2021, after roughly 75,000 Alexa and Echo owners filed individual arbitration demands alleging the devices recorded them without permission. The arbitration rules Amazon itself had chosen made the company responsible for filing and administration fees on every one of those claims, merit or not. The New York Times reported that Amazon "faces potentially tens of millions of dollars in fees that it will have to pay the private arbitrators to have those cases heard," and Amazon told customers their disputes would go to court instead.

On August 14, 2026, the clause came back. The operative sentence is close to word for word what Amazon deleted five years ago. Everything built around that sentence is new, and the new part starts working at 25 claims.

If you have an Amazon or Prime account, you're inside it already. Amazon emailed customers that Friday saying the terms were effective immediately, and it treats continued use of the service as agreement, so placing your next order is the entire consent process. Amazon disclosed no opt-out in that email, and none has turned up since.

What 75,000 Alexa Claims Cost Amazon in 2021

Mass arbitration was a fairly new tactic then: a handful of plaintiffs' firms, led by Keller Postman, worked out that a clause built to stop people from combining claims could be turned into a bill by combining the claimants instead. Keller Postman's 2022 press release claimed 125,000 clients from the Alexa campaign, per an August 24 Reuters column by Jenna Greene; roughly 75,000 demands were actually filed, a figure tracing to Wall Street Journal reporting and repeated since by The Verge and the Times. "For so long, the tide had been going the other way, with companies adding arbitration clauses to their contracts," NYU law professor Florencia Marotta-Wurgler told the NYT.

Amazon told the Times that many of those arbitrations were decided in its favor, and Greene reports the cases settled for an undisclosed amount, so the damage sat in the fee schedule rather than in the outcomes.

From May 2021 until this month, Amazon's Conditions of Use routed disputes to state or federal courts in King County, Washington, with both sides waiving a jury trial, per Mouse Print's copy of the language. Those five years produced the aggregated consumer litigation the old clause existed to prevent, including a $309 million settlement over return practices in January 2026. The same stretch brought the FTC's Prime "dark patterns" case, settled in September 2025 for $2.5 billion, which is a government enforcement action no consumer arbitration clause would have touched.

The Sentence Amazon Put Back, Word for Word

The pre-2021 clause, copied by Mouse Print before Amazon pulled it down:

"Any dispute or claim relating in any way to your use of any Amazon Service, or to any products or services sold or distributed by Amazon or through Amazon.com will be resolved by binding arbitration, rather than in court…"

What's been live since August 14, quoted by The Verge in Amazon's capitalization:

"YOU AND WE AGREE THAT ANY DISPUTE OR CLAIM RELATING IN ANY WAY TO YOUR USE OF ANY AMAZON SERVICE, OR TO ANY PRODUCTS OR SERVICES SOLD OR DISTRIBUTED BY AMAZON OR THROUGH AMAZON.COM, WILL BE RESOLVED BY BINDING ARBITRATION RATHER THAN IN COURT…"

The restored sentence is nearly unchanged; the versions separate at the waiver that follows it. The 2026 class-action waiver adds a line the older one has no equivalent for: "You and we may only seek or obtain individualized relief in arbitration, and claims or requests for public injunctive relief or relief where you or we act in a representative capacity are not allowed." Public injunctive relief doesn't vanish; PPC Land's read has it routed to court instead, the carve-out that keeps a clause like this enforceable in California. The forum moved too, from the American Arbitration Association to JAMS.

Where 25 Came From

Amazon's terms now define a "Mass Arbitration" as 25 or more coordinated demands raising common legal or factual issues within six months. Once that trips, claims get batched: minimum batches of 25 at the low end, at least 100 once 500 demands are on file, at least 500 past 2,500. Before filing, a claimant sends Amazon a dispute notice and waits 60 days; anyone financing the claims discloses the funding agreement.

JAMS, the provider Amazon chose, defines a mass arbitration in its Mass Arbitration Procedures, effective May 1, 2024, as "75 or more similar Demands for Arbitration, or such other amount as is specified in the Parties' agreement(s)." Amazon specified 25.

That's the number I keep coming back to. It isn't invented (25 is the AAA's own consumer threshold), so Amazon picked the provider with the looser default and wrote in the stricter competitor's number. JAMS's rule openly invites that, and it's still the choice that decides how expensive a 2021-style campaign is to assemble.

Both providers reset their mass-arbitration fee schedules in 2024, which already wiped out most of the per-claim cost math that made the Alexa wave expensive for Amazon. JAMS now charges a flat $8,000 to open a mass arbitration however many cases are in it, per JAMS senior vice president Elizabeth Carter in Greene's column. The reset isn't Amazon's doing, though Amazon's terms are drafted to exploit it.

"It's a huge barrier. It effectively makes it impossible to bring mass arbitrations," Raphael Janove of the American Association for Justice's mass arbitration group told the same column. Caleb Marker of Zimmerman Reed called the batching "a procedural morass," adding that "it's just that Amazon prefers this procedural morass over class actions, probably after an internal cost-benefit analysis."

For a single claimant, the terms read reasonably: a $250 consumer filing fee under JAMS's schedule (per CNET), Amazon's promise to "pay most of the cost," and small claims court still open. All of it describes what happens to one person.

Who Benefits

Amazon, and the mechanism is arithmetic. A class action exists because a $10 recurring charge or a mishandled return is worth nothing to litigate alone and a great deal to litigate together. Remove the aggregation and each claim costs more effort to pursue than it can ever pay back, even though the harm behind it hasn't changed at all.

Every U.S. Amazon account is covered, including an estimated 175 million Prime memberships. The executives with personal exposure here are already named: SVP Neil Lindsay and VP Jamil Ghani were individually named defendants in the FTC's Prime settlement over enrolling people without consent and making cancellation difficult. No filing names a decision-maker on the arbitration clause itself.

The reinstatement came seven weeks after FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson told MLex on June 23 that the agency was open to settling its monopolization case against Amazon on pro-consumer terms. That case reaches a bench trial on March 29, 2027, about seven and a half months after the reinstatement, in the same Seattle courtroom where Judge John Chun approved the Prime settlement in September 2025. Government enforcement isn't bound by a consumer arbitration clause, so the FTC's own case proceeds regardless. The arbitration clause matters for the private litigation that would normally follow a trial like that: adverse factual findings would hand plaintiffs' firms a ready-made evidentiary record, and closing the class-action route now limits what anyone can build with it later, whichever way March goes.

Greene's column also ties the reinstatement to Amazon's defective-product injury exposure, an area where courts have split on whether Amazon is liable as a seller, and arbitration is confidential enough to keep those claims away from juries. The August 14 revision separately routed personal-injury and property-damage claims to the law of the state where the harm happened rather than Washington law. Amazon's public account of all of it is that the change gives customers "a fast, cost-effective way to resolve disputes while still giving them the option of going to small claims court."

Google Wrote a Version of This in April

Google's Ads terms page carries a "Last updated: April 17, 2026" stamp, took effect July 1, and added batch arbitration for 25 or more near-identical claims. Keller Postman launched its mass-arbitration campaign against Google over ad pricing on May 11, three and a half weeks after that stamp (trade press dates the advertiser-facing notice to June 2). Law firms had been recruiting Google advertisers since October 2025, so the sequence reads as anticipation, not reaction.

The template predates both. In December 2025, the U.S. Chamber's Institute for Legal Reform published "Private Power, Public Harm", written by two Skadden lawyers, describing campaigns of "hundreds or even thousands of nearly identical demands" as coercive settlement extraction regardless of merit. The procedural answers it walks through (batching thresholds, litigation-funding disclosure) are the ones Amazon and Google both wrote into their 2026 terms.

Consent is where Amazon parts company with its peers. Reddit's advertising agreement last August (per PPC Land) and Google's ads terms this July each gave a 30-day window to opt out of arbitration. Both are advertiser contracts, and neither is confirmed to reach the class-action waiver, so it isn't a clean comparison. Amazon disclosed no opt-out at all, and Reuters noted that companies usually flag terms changes weeks in advance while Amazon's landed the same day the email did.

State consumer law can't reach any of it. AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion held in 2011 that the Federal Arbitration Act preempts state rules conditioning enforceability on classwide procedures, per the Congressional Research Service. The bill that would undo that, the FAIR Act, was reintroduced September 15, 2025, has 69 House cosponsors and no scheduled floor vote; its predecessor passed the House 225-186 in 2019 and never reached a Senate vote.

The Bottom Line

The exemption everyone keeps repeating is narrower than it sounds. Litigation already filed before August 14 continues, which is why the Fire TV Stick and Ring privacy cases are unaffected. New claims arbitrate regardless of when the conduct happened. If Amazon overcharged you in 2024 and you find out in 2027, you're arbitrating alone.

Two weeks on, nobody has challenged the clause. Vanderbilt law professor Brian Fitzpatrick told Greene's column that the batch provisions could be tested on "whether the procedures as laid out actually fall within the definition of 'arbitration' under the Federal Arbitration Act of 1925," and called the wider fight a cat and mouse game, each side shifting in response to the other's last move. Amazon has just shifted, and the question is whether anyone can still afford to shift back. The 2021 wave worked because the fee structure of the day made 75,000 claims expensive for Amazon and cheap for the firms filing them; the 2024 reset and the 25-claim batching rule both run the other way.