Block's Layoffs Raise Concerns of AI-Washing Amid Job Displacement Debate

Jack Dorsey’s job cuts at Block arouse suspicions of AI-washing Sign up now: Get ST's newsletters delivered to your inbox Block’s recent history suggests that AI adoption is not the only factor influencing its decision to cut thousands of employees. PHOTO: REUTERS Published Mar 02, 2026, 10:43 AM Updated Mar 02, 2026, 05:36 PM NEW YORK – When Block laid off nearly half its staff last week, co-founder Jack Dorsey offered a seemingly simple explanation: Artificial intelligence was allowing the fintech company to do more with fewer employees. The announcement, though, landed at the centre of a complex debate over AI and the future of work – on one side, genuine fear that the technology will displace jobs at an unprecedented pace; on the other, deep cynicism that companies are exploiting that fear to dress up old-fashioned cost-cutting as technological futurism. The possibility that companies are spinning employees and investors and using AI as a shiny excuse for ugly layoffs has become widespread enough that it has a nickname: AI-washing. Block’s recent history suggests that AI adoption is not the only factor influencing its staffing decisions. The company loaded up on workers during and after the Covid-19 pandemic, more than tripling its employee base between 2019 and 2022, and has been slower than peers to scale back. Its stock had fallen roughly 40 per cent since the beginning of 2025, a trajectory that had nothing to do with AI and everything to do with a business that had grown unwieldy. “When I look at the overall employee number, this is more about the business being bloated for so long than it is about AI,” said Mr Zachary Gunn, a senior analyst at Financial Technology Partners, an investment bank focused on fintechs. While companies are eager to show investors they are embracing new technology, experts on workplace automation say that AI tools have not reached the point where they are causing significant cutbacks in the labour market. A note from Goldman Sachs published on Feb 27 argues that fears of an imminent AI jobs apocalypse are “excessive”. The bank’s economists estimate that sectors like tech that are impacted by AI are shaving just 5,000 to 10,000 jobs a month from overall payroll growth in the United States. Goldman forecasts a 0.5 percentage point increase in the unemployment rate as adoption rises. European Central Bank (ECB) president Christine Lagarde told lawmakers in Brussels last week that ECB economists are monitoring for signs that AI is causing job losses and are “not yet seeing” the “waves of redundancies that are feared”. White-collar risks When Amazon announced sweeping layoffs in 2025, it went to pains to say that AI was not the explanation. Asked about the cuts on an October earnings call, Amazon chief executive Andy Jassy told analysts that the decision was “not really financially driven and it’s not even really AI-driven – not right now, at least”. Similar questions have come up over and over in the past year as a growing number of companies, including Salesforce and HP, cite AI efficiencies as the reason for job cuts. The questions about Block were especially pointed because the company’s announcement came just days after a viral Substack newsletter, from a small outfit called Citrini Research, sketched out a nightmare scenario of mass unemployment, sending stocks tumbling. That report caught fire in no small part because big AI companies have been pumping out new, more powerful models. One of the leading players, Anthropic, recently released a number of tools that take on the bread and butter of American corporate work, such as financial analysis and legal research. Large language models have proven to be particularly adept at coding, and software engineers have been among the loudest proponents of the idea that big changes are coming. “If you’ve spent time with tools like Claude Code or Codex, you can see how smaller teams really can ship more,” said Dr Gad Levanon, chief economist of The Burning Glass Institute, a labour market research non-profit that studies AI’s impact on jobs. “The risk to white-collar work over the next few years is real, and workers, managers and policymakers should be planning for that world now,” he added. Messages like those may turn out to have been prudent, but they are also magnifying the anxiety many workers already have about a tough job market. US companies announced more than 108,000 job cuts in January, the most in the first month of the year since 2009, when the country was in an economic meltdown. A recent survey of global executives published in the Harvard Business Review found that while AI has been cited as the reason for some layoffs, those cuts are almost entirely anticipatory: Executives expect big efficiency gains that have not yet been realised. ‘Two options’ In the letter that Mr Dorsey sent to his employees, and shared on social media, he put less emphasis on jobs at Block that have already been replaced by AI and more