On Feb 27, Jack Dorsey, the celebrated founder of Twitter and the current chairman of the tech company Block, took to Twitter to break some unpleasant news: Block is laying off 40% of its workforce. 

The 4,000 people aren’t being laid off because Block has run into losses or is facing financial constraints. In fact, the company had on Feb 26 announced that its gross profits grew 24% in the quarter, driven by a 33% surge in the Cash App business, which enables peer-to-peer mobile payments. Outlook is also looking strong, with the company expecting gross profit of $12.2 billion. 

That’s why the announcement has sent shockwaves: the much-feared job losses from AI, widely discussed since Anthropic announced Claude-focused enterprise tools, seem to be finally here. “Today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000,” Dorsey said on Twitter. “That means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation.” 

Since the beginning of the year, tech companies worldwide have been feeling the heat as Anthropic unveiled Claude Cowork, an enterprise-focused, agentic AI workspace that can plan, execute, and automate tasks directly on a user’s computer. On January 30, 2026, Anthropic followed that up by introducing 11 new plugins for Claude Cowork, helping turn Claude from a conversational assistant into a function-specific workplace collaborator.  That led to a $830 billion global selloff in software and services stocks, raising serious concerns over what AI was likely to do. 

Dorsey, believes the intelligence tools the company has built now need less human intervention. “We're not making this decision because we're in trouble. Our business is strong,” Dorsey said on X. “Gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. But something has changed. We're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working that fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. And that's accelerating rapidly.”

While Dorsey believes that a decision at this scale carries its own risks, the company has conducted a full review to determine the roles and people it requires to reliably grow the business.  “And we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles,” Dorsey says. “I accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers.”

In a letter to shareholders, Dorsey also said that within the next year, he believes most companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes. Meta, Microsoft, and Google have already laid off workers amid shifting investments toward AI. The recent layoffs also came a few days after Citrini Research published a viral doomsday AI paper outlining a worst-case scenario in which job losses were imminent in 2028.   

“India was the inverse,” the Citrini report said about India in 2028. “The country’s IT services sector exported over $200 billion annually, the single largest contributor to India’s current account surplus and the offset that financed its persistent goods trade deficit. The entire model was built on one value proposition: Indian developers cost a fraction of their American counterparts. But the marginal cost of an AI coding agent had collapsed to, essentially, the cost of electricity. TCS, Infosys, and Wipro saw contract cancellations accelerate through 2027. The rupee fell 18% against the dollar in four months as the services surplus that had anchored India’s external accounts evaporated. By Q1 2028, the IMF had begun “preliminary discussions” with New Delhi.” 

With Block highlighting what AI will do, it’s not looking good for jobs worldwide.