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# AI Layoffs

2026-07-22

This Round of Big Tech Layoffs Is Hunting the Product Managers Who Just Pass Messages Along

As of July, the tech industry has cut roughly 200,000 jobs in 2026 — a thousand a day — and more than half the layoff notices name-check AI. The strangest data point is Microsoft: on the same day it cut 4,800 people, HR chief Amy Coleman went out of her way to add, 'The roles eliminated today were not replaced by AI.' Everyone else is racing to say 'AI did it'; Microsoft is racing to say 'don't blame AI.' Underneath those two contradicting statements is the same answer nobody wants to say out loud: the first thing AI eats isn't a job title, it's a layer — the message-passing layer. And product managers happen to be one of the most message-dense roles there is.

2026-07-07

The same AI: some companies use it to fire, others to hire

Tech layoffs explicitly blamed on AI have hit over 87,000 people this year. Meta is raising capex up to $145B to build AI infrastructure while cutting ~8,000 jobs — and openly says the cuts are 'to offset other investments we're making,' which translates to: we're laying people off to pay for GPUs. Yet in that same industry, Anthropic has had zero layoffs this year and is growing fast; OpenAI is standing up a $4B deployment company to recruit Forward Deployed Engineers everywhere; Google just posted 59 of the same role. Same AI, one company's excuse to fire, another company's reason to hire. Which means the variable was never the AI. Here's what's actually going on — and what it means for the rest of us.

2026-06-18

Altman Lets It Slip: Half of the 'AI Layoffs' Are an Act

The guy selling AI hardest just admitted, on the record, something everyone already suspected. Sam Altman says a lot of so-called 'AI layoffs' are really AI washing — cuts that were coming anyway, blamed on AI to look dignified. What makes it stranger: months later he said he was 'delighted to be wrong,' because the jobs apocalypse he once feared never showed up. On one side, six figures of tech jobs vanished in 2026 under the AI banner. On the other, AI's top salesman says the whole thing got oversold. The gap between those two statements is the part worth watching.

2026-06-16

80% of Companies Cut Staff for AI and Got No Return. They Bought AI for the Wrong Job

Gartner surveyed 350 companies with over $1B in revenue, and about 80% cut staff because of AI. But the companies that cut weren't any more likely to see a real return than the ones that didn't. The layoffs freed up budget; they didn't free up return. The reason is simple: these companies treated AI as a way to replace people and save money, when AI's real value is amplifying human judgment. Cut people as a cost and you cut exactly the part that produces the return.