Was it a bull market that got wrongly killed, or the end of an era?

In the past month, the U.S. tech industry laid off 38,242 people in one go, the highest since August 2024, with 123,000 people packing up their jobs and leaving in the first five months of this year. The official reason given in four words — "AI is the main reason." How dignified it sounds—better to say than "The company saves money," more civilized than "Your cost-performance ratio isn't enough," a hundred times more dignified than "We actually hire more but feel embarrassed to say." But if you look closely at the data, you'll notice an interesting fact: in January, only 7% of layoffs were attributed to AI, but by May, that number had soared to 40%, nearly six times higher in three months. AI's evolution is truly astonishing—not only can it write code, draw images, and make PPTs, but it has also learned to find an irrefutable reason for layoffs.

Meta laid off nearly 8,000 employees, and an internal memo in black and white states it will "cover the high spending on AI infrastructure." In other words: we spent tens of billions training AI, but the money is running low, so we cut some staff to make up for it. Oracle is even more impressive: in the early morning raid at the end of March, 30,000 people left immediately upon receiving the email, skipping a farewell ceremony. But if you say these people have really been replaced by AI? MIT's research speaks for itself: 95% of AI pilot projects fail to achieve the expected efficiency gains. Altman himself admitted, "Many companies blame AI for layoffs that are already being carried out." So what is the truth? AI is not a knife, it's an excuse. The knife has long been sharpened; the AI just makes the knife handing posture a bit more graceful.

Even more magical, while this wave of layoffs occurred, the tech industry was still hiring a large number of people. In May, 38,242 jobs were cut, but 11,250 new positions were posted, ranking first in the industry. This is not business expansion, but a reshuffle. They cut the backend engineers who had worked at CRUD for five years and hired AI engineers capable of parameter tuning; They cut the operations team that had written advertorials for three years and hired prompt engineers who could generate fifty articles with one click using AI. Zuckerberg put it bluntly: laying off 8,000 people is paying the price for AI. You haven't been replaced by AI; you have been replaced by AI's budget. The position remains, but the person sitting above it has changed from you to someone more expensive and skilled in using AI. Meanwhile, the end of full-time employees has arrived. The proportion of temporary workers in the U.S. tech industry has risen from 4.3% in 1999 to nearly 40% now, and 29% of hiring managers say they will reinstate laid-off positions but use contract workers, with salaries cut by one-third and no benefits at all. Many employees laid off at Amazon and Microsoft returned to their original teams as outsourced workers, and the same work was paid at lower prices without social insurance. This isn't technological progress; it's using AI to split employment relationships into LEGO.

Finally, let's look at a piece of dark humor. In May, nonfarm payrolls added 172,000 jobs—employment data looks great—but the number of first-time unemployment claims is also rising. So where are the new jobs? Restaurants, hotels, and delivery. And where are the layoffs happening? Big tech companies, with annual salaries in the six figures. Overall numbers are up, but the feeling on the ground is down. Americans are scrolling through news about how "employment is booming" while seeing former colleagues looking for jobs on LinkedIn. Meanwhile, those three AI giants queued up for IPOs—SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic—are looking to raise a total of $200 billion. They use the money saved from laying people off to go public, then use the IPO money to lay off the next round. A closed loop.

So back to that question: is AI the reason, or just an excuse? The answer is pretty clear. AI really is changing the world, but in the 2026 layoff notice, it’s mostly just a footnote everyone can accept. The real reasons have never changed: profit, stock price, and next quarter’s earnings. Next time someone tells you 'AI will free humanity,' you can smile and reply: it definitely freed me—from my paycheck.