Written by: Nancy, PANews

The louder the AI wars become, the more anxious humanity feels.

As effective accelerationism has become the action guide in Silicon Valley, AI is showing an astonishing pace of evolution. The commercial wave sweeping in has led to a rise in unemployment concerns. Layoff waves have come one after another, from Silicon Valley giants to major Chinese companies, from traditional finance to the cryptocurrency market, and the AI panic seems to be continually amplifying.

However, this wave of layoffs is more a belated reckoning of the expansion bubble under the pretext of AI.

The global tech industry is undergoing an unprecedented "mass slimming," and the name AI is becoming the "legitimate" reason for this wave of layoffs.

According to UK financial research firm RationalFX, in the first quarter of 2026, the global tech sector has eliminated more than 45,000 jobs, with at least 20% attributed to AI. In contrast, the proportion of layoffs due to AI was less than 8% in 2025. This trend is still accelerating, with the total number of layoffs expected to surpass 260,000 for the year.

Wall Street was the first to hit the "streamline" button. Amazon, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, BlackRock, BlackRock, Meta... whether financial giants or tech pioneers, all have unwittingly activated layoff modes.

China, a stronghold of AI, has not been spared either. Well-known internet giants like Tencent, ByteDance, NetEase, Bilibili, and Baidu have also adjusted their team structures.

The crypto sphere has similarly witnessed a wave of AI-driven layoffs, with projects like Block, Gemini, Crypto.com, and Algorand announcing reductions in scale this year. Among them, Block even announced a drastic layoff of 40%, citing that AI has changed the meaning of establishing and operating companies.

Panic feelings are spreading globally. From the apocalyptic narrative of "AI replacing humans" in "2028 Global Intelligence Crisis" to the AI risk map published by AI deity Karpathy going viral online, this unrest is rapidly sweeping the globe.

It seems that with AI not stopping, layoffs may not either.

The rapid iteration of AI was initially sparked in Silicon Valley.

In Silicon Valley, AI is mainly divided into two camps:

• Effective accelerationism (e/acc), an emerging philosophical current that strongly advocates technological development, calls for unconditional acceleration of technological innovation, and even aims to disrupt social structures;
• Effective altruism (EA), which advocates developing and applying technologies that can maximize social positive impact while minimizing potential harms.

These two forces are positioned against each other in Silicon Valley, engaging in a power struggle.

In the realm of effective altruism, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), the founder of FTX well-known in the crypto community, was a prominent supporter and an early investor in AI giant Anthropic from the same camp. However, after the FTX collapse at the end of 2022, this ideology faced severe questioning and ridicule.

On the other side, there is also a Sam in the AI circle, namely Altman, the founder of OpenAI, who is an optimist. Elon Musk, a follower of effective altruism, was one of the co-founders of OpenAI but left due to ideological differences. Subsequently, Altman raised funds rapidly, spent aggressively, and launched the generative AI ChatGPT in 2022. This product was then called the fastest adopted consumer product in history and helped Silicon Valley gradually lean towards the accelerationism route.

During this process, OpenAI also faced a shocking palace intrigue due to the ideological conflict between accelerationism and safetyism. Ultimately, Altman emerged victorious and returned, marking an important turning point in the development of AI.

Since then, effective accelerationism has gained increasing popularity, becoming the action guide for Silicon Valley elites as AI began its full commercial launch and moved towards large-scale implementation.

Karpathy assessed the replacement risk score for 342 professions in the U.S. using AI. In this visualized map, green represents safe positions, while red indicates large-scale automation. Jobs that primarily involve using computers and processing digital information have higher exposure scores; on the other hand, outdoor manual labor or jobs requiring interaction with the real world (like electricians, plumbers, etc.) have significantly lower scores. However, a high score does not mean unemployment, it merely indicates a higher risk of being replaced by AI.

But according to NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, AI will not only not cause unemployment, but it will actually enhance productivity and create more job opportunities; venture capital firm a16z believes that history has repeatedly shown that automation does not lead to permanent widespread unemployment, and AI is more about enhancement rather than complete replacement of humans; Morgan Stanley's latest report indicates that AI will not lead to large-scale permanent unemployment but will change the employment structure.

Block's case of rehiring also supports similar views, as the first batch of laid-off employees has already been invited back.

Several Block employees have reported receiving return-to-work invitations on LinkedIn due to "administrative errors" and a lack of key infrastructure personnel. CEO Jack Dorsey previously admitted that the layoff decision might have been a mistake, and some laid-off employees believe that this round of layoffs was more about boosting investor confidence than solely being based on AI replacement considerations.

AI is inducing a FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) sentiment while also being seen as a pervasive collective anxiety. However, this round of layoffs feels more like a "delayed correction."

The Oxford Economics Institute recently noted that while there are individual cases of jobs being replaced by artificial intelligence, macroeconomic data does not support the notion that automation will trigger structural changes in employment. It seems that companies are not widely employing AI to replace employees; instead, they may be using this technology as a shield for routine layoffs.

Compared to admitting weaknesses in traditional operations such as soft consumer demand or prior over-hiring, attributing layoffs to AI applications can send a more positive signal to investors.

Laura Ullrich, the economic research director at recruitment platform Indeed, also pointed out in a recent interview that this relates to the over-hiring or recruitment boom seen in the post-pandemic era. CEOs are privately admitting that the company "is still too large, and the organization is too bloated."

During the pandemic, major global economies entered a period of massive easing, and the online economy rapidly expanded, creating a large number of "special demand positions." Many leading companies doubled or even more in size during this period, with generous pay raises and aggressive 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 overstaffing they engaged in during the past few years is redundant and must be slimmed down.

The crypto market is no different; the pandemic-induced liquidity and low-interest rates created a massive bubble, and as market liquidity tightened, project survival pressures surged, compounded by persistently low market conditions, making layoffs an inevitable adjustment. Jack Dorsey also acknowledged when responding to layoffs that there was indeed over-hiring during the pandemic.

It can be said that today's mass layoffs are not solely triggered by AI; they are more a cumulative effect of the return of the economic cycle and market corrections. Although AI does indeed have a visible impact on certain specific positions, it acts more as a catalyst rather than the root cause.

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