AI Layoffs 2026: 13,801 open roles at companies still hiring hard

If you landed here worried about the layoff wave, here’s the headline: the same industry that cut 90,000 jobs in Q1 2026 is hiring more than 13,000 open roles right now. The layoffs and the hiring are both real — they’re happening in different companies and different functions.

Below: the full hiring leaderboard, then the layoff tracker, then a breakdown of which roles are growing vs. which are getting cut.

Who’s Hiring Right Now (Top 15)

The Layoff Side: What Actually Happened in Q1 2026

In the first three months of 2026, over 90,000 tech employees were laid off — the biggest wave since 2022–2023. Almost every company that cut jobs cited AI as the reason: Oracle is funding a $156 billion AI buildout, Block’s Jack Dorsey told employees that “intelligence tools” will replace their jobs, Dell is pivoting to AI servers, Meta is redirecting headcount from Reality Labs to AI.

How much of this is genuine AI replacement vs. cost-cutting dressed up in an AI narrative? Both are true at the same time — we break it down further below.

The Full 2026 AI Layoff Tracker

Every major tech layoff in Q1 2026, ranked by headcount impact. All cited AI as a primary or contributing factor.

The Timeline

April 2026 Update

The numbers keep climbing. Updated reporting from Tom’s Hardware and TechSpot now put Q1 2026 layoffs at nearly 80,000 — up from the 61,000 figure when this article was first published. Almost 48% of those cuts were explicitly attributed to AI and workflow automation. Year-to-date, the total has surpassed 90,000.

In early April, GoPro announced a 23% workforce reduction (145 positions), citing falling sales and the need to restructure around a new product generation. Pendo, the Raleigh-based product analytics unicorn, cut 10% of its workforce (90 employees) on April 7, with engineering, sales, and customer success teams hit hardest. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged “some AI-washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do.”

AI-Washing vs. Real Replacement

Bloomberg reported suspicions of “AI-washing” — companies using AI as a convenient cover for old-fashioned cost-cutting. The evidence is mixed, and the truth is uncomfortable for both sides of the debate.

The case for AI-washing

Block’s stock surging 24% after cutting 40% of its workforce tells you what Wall Street actually valued: not AI transformation, but cost reduction. Dorsey’s letter about “intelligence tools” gave the cuts a narrative, but the market priced it as a margin play. Fortune published “9 reasons AI isn’t going to take your job yet,” arguing that most companies are nowhere close to replacing humans with AI at the scale they claim.

The case for genuine replacement

But dismissing all of this as theater ignores real signals. Atlassian cut roles but announced 800 new AI-focused positions — a genuine reallocation, not just cuts. Dorsey’s memo was uncommonly specific: he predicted that “most companies will reach the same conclusion within a year.” That’s not vague corporate speak. It’s a thesis about the future of work.

44% of hiring managers now anticipate AI will be the top driver of layoffs this year. Whether the current wave is fully justified by AI capabilities or not, the belief system is real — and belief drives action. Meanwhile, companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are genuinely hiring hundreds of AI engineers — a real reallocation of talent, not just a narrative.

The honest answer

Both things are true simultaneously. Some companies are genuinely replacing roles with AI. Others are using AI as a convenient narrative for cost-cutting they would have done anyway. And most are doing a bit of both — real automation in some areas, narrative cover in others. The uncomfortable truth is that it doesn’t matter much to the 61,000 people who lost their jobs.

What’s Actually Being Cut

The pattern across every major layoff this quarter reveals what companies consider expendable — and what they don’t.

Roles being cut

• Go-to-market (GTM) and sales operations. Block’s 40% cut hit sales and operations hardest. Oracle’s Revenue and Health Sciences division saw 30%+ reductions. These are functions where AI-assisted workflows can genuinely reduce headcount.
• Manual workflow and operations roles. Data entry, report generation, customer support triage, and process management roles are being automated or consolidated across every company that announced cuts.
• Middle management. Amazon and Meta have both explicitly targeted management layers as part of “flattening” initiatives. Fewer direct reports means fewer managers.
• Non-AI product divisions. Meta’s Reality Labs cuts and Dell’s traditional hardware reductions show companies deprioritizing non-AI product lines entirely.

Roles being preserved or grown

• Core engineering. Software engineers are largely being redeployed, not cut. Atlassian’s 800 new AI positions are staffed partly by internal transfers from cut product lines.
• AI/ML engineers and researchers. Every company cutting roles is simultaneously hiring AI talent. The reallocation is real.
• Infrastructure engineers. Oracle’s $156B AI buildout, Dell’s AI server pivot, and the data center boom mean GPU infrastructure, cloud ops, and networking roles are growing.
• AI safety and alignment. Companies like Anthropic and OpenAI are expanding safety teams as regulatory pressure mounts.

Where the 13,801 Jobs Actually Are

The top-15 table above covers the largest employers. Below: the same hiring pool broken down by category, so you can match openings to your background.

Frontier AI labs

If you want to work on AI rather than be replaced by it, these companies are building the technology everyone else is buying. See our culture profiles for Databricks, OpenAI, Anthropic, CoreWeave, and Glean:

Infrastructure & developer tools

The AI boom requires infrastructure. Datadog, Snowflake, Crusoe, and Stripe are building the picks and shovels:

European companies hiring

If you’re based in Europe or looking for European opportunities, these companies are actively growing:

What to Look For in Your Next Role

If you were laid off in the name of AI, choosing your next company based solely on title and compensation is a mistake. The culture of the company that laid you off matters — it determines how they treated you on the way out. The culture of your next company matters even more.

Transparency. Oracle employees had nearly a month between the Bloomberg report and the actual cuts, but leadership said nothing. Block at least told employees directly via Dorsey’s letter. Look for companies where leadership communicates openly, even when the news is bad. On JobsByCulture, filter for the transparent culture value.

Investment in people, not just models. Companies that invest in employee growth — learning budgets, conference attendance, internal mobility — signal that they view headcount as an investment, not a cost to be optimized. Filter for the learning culture value.

Psychological safety. After being blindsided by a layoff, you need to know your next company won’t treat you as disposable. Look for companies where Glassdoor reviews mention supportive management and blameless cultures. Filter for psych-safety.

Engineering-driven culture. Companies where engineers have influence over product direction and company strategy are less likely to treat technical employees as interchangeable. Filter for eng-driven.

Financial stability. Check whether a company has had layoffs before and how they handled them. A company like Stripe, which handled its 2022 layoffs with transparent communication and generous severance, signals a fundamentally different management philosophy than a 6am termination email.