CEOs Cut 154,000 Jobs Blaming AI, Then Softened the Story Before Their IPO

For a year the C-suite competed to promise AI would erase whole job categories, and then the tone flipped to warm nonsense about keeping humans at the center. Sam Altman now says the industry “underestimated how much we’re going to be able to keep people at the center of everything,” a lovely sentiment arriving exactly as OpenAI and Anthropic file confidential IPO paperwork chasing valuations near a trillion dollars each. The receipts undercut the reassurance: AI was the leading cited reason for U.S. job cuts in June, and roughly 154,000 tech workers lost jobs in the first half of 2026. MIT economist David Autor said the plainest version, that bosses realized telling the world your product destroys the economy is bad for business. Forbes on why CEOs changed their AI job-loss message