#BlockAILayoffs
Block, the financial technology company based in Oakland, is reducing its workforce by 40%, from more than 10,000 employees to less than 6,000. The stated reason: AI.
"Intelligence tools have transformed the concept of building and running a business. They are already seeing it internally," wrote CEO Jack Dorsey in a letter to shareholders.
A significantly smaller team opens in a new tab, with the tools we are developing, can do more and better. And the capabilities of intelligence tools multiply every week.
For months, professionals in the tech sector have been anxious about the consequences that AI will have on their jobs. The anxiety has been especially acute among software engineers, who have seen how tools like Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex have absorbed an increasingly larger part of their work.
