🤖 The tech industry laid off a staggering 78,557 workers in the first quarter of 2026 alone — and in a twist nobody saw coming except literally everyone, nearly 48% of those cuts were directly attributed to AI and workflow automation. According to a new report from the Institute for Jobs That No Longer Exist Because a Chatbot Does It For $0.003 Per Hour, the average affected employee had between 4 and 12 years of experience, a LinkedIn profile that hasn’t been updated since the before-times, and a slowly dawning realisation that the machine they were asked to help train is now doing their job while they write cover letters into the void. 🏢
😂 The Cluely AI startup added spice to the tech chaos this week when co-founder Roy Lee — backed by Andreessen Horowitz — admitted to fabricating growth numbers, inflating ARR from $5.2 million to $7 million, making him the rare founder who used AI to create fake AI metrics about his AI company. Industry insiders describe this as either ‘a new low’ or ‘actually pretty on brand for the sector.’ Meanwhile a major AI academic conference rejected 497 papers for AI-assisted peer review violations, which means academic researchers are now using AI to evaluate AI papers, which other AI is then using to write more AI papers, and nobody is entirely sure where this ends. 📊
🤯 A US federal judge ruled that the Trump administration violated free-speech protections by banning Anthropic’s AI models in government systems — making it the first time in history that an AI company successfully argued it has First Amendment rights, a legal development that philosophers, lawyers, and sentient chatbots are all processing in real time. Major US AI companies including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are also now sharing intelligence about Chinese firms allegedly using ‘distillation’ to extract capabilities from American AI models, which is either corporate espionage or just really aggressive plagiarism depending on how charitable you’re feeling. 🇺🇸
💬 Tech workers affected by AI layoffs describe the experience as ‘disorienting,’ ‘surreal,’ and ‘a bit rich given that my last project was building the thing that replaced me.’ Some experts argue AI is being used as a convenient scapegoat for poor business decisions. “We laid off the team and told them it was AI,” said one unnamed tech executive who was sweating visibly throughout the interview. “It was 40% AI and 60% we just didn’t want to pay benefits anymore. Those numbers are not for publication.” 🤖💼
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