Jack Dorsey saw the Substack-induced AI panic last week and said hold my beer.
Driving the news: U.S. tech firm Block announced it is laying off 4,000 workers — nearly half its workforce — with CEO Jack Dorsey pointing directly to improvements in AI tools as the reason for the cuts. Block’s stock jumped 16% following the news.
Why it matters: A couple of years ago, layoffs of this scale would have been a PR nightmare. Now, job cuts are largely celebrated by investors — as long as they’re attributed to AI.
A recent report found that companies cited AI as the reason for over 50,000 layoffs in 2025, despite little evidence that roles were actually being replaced by the tech. The trend has been dubbed “AI-washing.”
Our take: AI isn’t ready to step in and replace all of these jobs today, but companies like Block are casting upstream with layoffs, anticipating that in the not-so-distant future they’ll need a fraction of the headcount to accomplish the same amount of work (if not more).—LA