Author: Nancy, PANews
As the AI war grows louder, human anxiety intensifies.
With effective accelerationism becoming the action guide in Silicon Valley, AI is exhibiting astonishing evolutionary speed, and the wave of business brought about by it has caused unemployment discussions to heat up. Waves of layoffs are occurring, from Silicon Valley giants to major companies in China, from traditional finance to the crypto market; AI panic seems to be continuously amplifying.
However, this wave of layoffs is more of a delayed reckoning for the expansion bubble under the guise of AI.
From Wall Street giants to the crypto circle, AI presses the streamline button
The global tech industry is undergoing an unprecedented "great slimming down," with AI serving as the "legitimate" reason for this wave of layoffs.
According to statistics from the British financial research institution RationalFX, in the first quarter of 2026 alone, the global tech industry has cut over 45,000 jobs, with at least 20% attributed to AI. In contrast, the proportion of layoffs due to AI in 2025 was less than 8%. This trend continues to accelerate, with the total number of layoffs for the year expected to surpass 260,000.
Wall Street was the first to press the "streamline button." Companies like Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, BlackRock, and Meta… regardless of whether they are financial giants or tech pioneers, all have simultaneously initiated layoff modes.
The same is true for China, where the AI scene has not been spared. Familiar internet giants like Tencent, ByteDance, NetEase, Bilibili, and Baidu are also adjusting their team structures.
In the crypto circle, an AI layoff wave is also rising, with projects like Block, Gemini, Crypto.com, and Algorand announcing scaling down this year. Among them, Block announced a violent layoff of 40%, claiming that AI has changed the meaning of establishing and operating a company.
Panic is spreading globally. From the apocalyptic narrative of "AI replacing humans" in "The 2028 Global Intelligent Crisis" to the "AI Job Risk Map" released by AI guru Karpathy going viral, this wave of unease is rapidly sweeping across the world.
It seems that not only AI continues, but layoffs may also be ongoing.
The victory of Silicon Valley's "accelerationism" halts AI anxiety
The rapid iteration of AI has its roots in Silicon Valley.
In Silicon Valley, AI is mainly divided into two major camps:
Effective accelerationism (e/acc), a new philosophical trend that strongly advocates technological development and unconditional acceleration of technological innovation, even aiming to disrupt social structures;
Effective altruism (EA), which advocates developing and applying technologies that maximize positive social impact while minimizing potential harms.
The two forces in Silicon Valley are each in their positions, competing with each other.
Within effective altruism, the well-known founder of FTX in the crypto circle, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), was a prominent supporter and also an early investor in AI giant Anthropic. However, at the end of 2022, FTX collapsed, leading to severe questioning and ridicule of this idea.
On the other hand, there is another Sam in the AI circle, namely Altman, the founder of OpenAI, who is an optimist. Elon Musk, a follower of effective altruism, was once a co-founder of OpenAI but left due to differences in direction. Subsequently, Altman raised funds and quickly burned through them, launching the generative AI ChatGPT in 2022. This product was then termed the fastest-adopted consumer product in history, pushing Silicon Valley gradually towards the accelerationist path.
During this process, OpenAI had also triggered a shocking internal conflict due to the rivalry between accelerationism and securityism. Ultimately, Altman emerged victorious and returned, marking a significant turning point in AI development.
Since then, effective accelerationism has become increasingly popular, serving as the action guide for Silicon Valley elites, with AI starting to commercialize at full speed and moving towards scaled implementation.
Karpathy has produced substitution risk scores for 342 professions in the U.S. using AI. In this visual map, green represents safe jobs, while red signifies large-scale automation. Roles that primarily involve using computers and processing digital information have a higher exposure score; whereas outdoor physical labor and jobs requiring real-world human interaction (such as electricians and plumbers) score relatively low. However, a high score does not equate to unemployment, but rather indicates a greater risk of being eliminated by AI.
However, according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, AI will not lead to job losses but instead boost productivity and create more employment opportunities. Venture capital firm a16z believes that history has repeatedly shown that automation does not cause permanent large-scale unemployment; rather, AI is more about enhancement than complete replacement of humans. A recent report from Morgan Stanley pointed out that AI will not lead to massive permanent layoffs but will change the employment structure instead.
The re-hiring case at Block also supports a similar viewpoint, as the first batch of laid-off employees has already been recalled.
Several Block employees indicated on LinkedIn that they received invitations for re-employment, with reasons including "administrative errors" and insufficient manpower for critical infrastructure. CEO Jack Dorsey previously acknowledged that the layoff decision may have been erroneous, while some employees believe that this layoff was more to boost investor confidence rather than purely due to AI substitution considerations.
In the name of AI, the reality of rectification
AI is giving rise to FOMO (fear of missing out) sentiments while also being viewed as a spreading collective anxiety. However, this wave of layoffs resembles more of a "delayed correction."
A recent study from the Oxford Economics Institute points out that although there are isolated cases of certain jobs being replaced by AI, macroeconomic data does not support the view that automation will trigger structural changes in employment. Companies do not seem to be utilizing AI on a large scale to replace employees; rather, they might use this technology as a shield for regular layoffs.
Attributing layoffs to AI applications sends a more positive signal to investors compared to admitting a decline in consumer demand or previous overhiring and other traditional operational errors.
Laura Ullrich, the economic research director at recruiting platform Indeed, also pointed out in a recent interview that this is related to the overhiring or hiring frenzy that emerged in the post-pandemic era. CEOs privately admit that companies "are still too large and too bloated."
During the pandemic, major economies worldwide entered a large-scale easing era, and the online economy expanded rapidly, giving rise to numerous "special demand positions." Many top companies doubled or even more in size during this period, with generous salary increases and large-scale expansions becoming the norm.
However, as the economy gradually returns to normal, job demand has begun to decline, and the Federal Reserve's interest rate hikes, high interest rates, and soft consumer spending have also slowed economic growth. More tech companies are starting to realize that the employee scales they blindly expanded in the past few years are redundant and need to slim down.
The crypto market is no different; the easing during the pandemic and low interest rates created a huge bubble, and after the tightening of market liquidity, projects faced increased survival pressure, coupled with a prolonged downturn, making layoffs an inevitable adjustment. Jack Dorsey also acknowledged that overhiring did occur during the pandemic when responding to layoffs.
It can be said that the current large-scale layoffs are not merely triggered by AI; they are more a cumulative effect of the return of the economic cycle and market correction. Although AI does have visible impacts on certain specific positions, it acts more as a catalyst rather than the root cause.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
