Jack Dorsey's Block lays off nearly half of workforce due to AI

Jack Dorsey's Block, a fintech company that owns Square and Cash App, is laying off nearly half of its workforce.

Dorsey announced the layoffs on X, citing AI as the main reason behind the move.

"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," he wrote.

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The layoffs come after a strong quarter for Block, with revenue, profit, and customer base all growing. But Dorsey appears to think that the rise of AI makes this move inevitable, presenting the decision as a choice between doing one sharp cut now, or laying people off slowly over a longer period of time.

"I'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome," he wrote.

Employees that are being laid off will get their salary for 20 weeks plus one week per year of tenure, six months of health care, and $5,000 in cash, among other benefits. But how hard will it be for them to find another job?

Dorsey's reasoning echoes the sentiment recently shared by several tech leaders, with Anthropic's Boris Cherny claiming that "coding is largely solved" and Elon Musk saying that AI will "replace all jobs." A widely shared "thought exercise" by Citrini recently predicted an economic collapse by 2028 due to AI driving humans out of work.

"Something has changed," wrote Dorsey. "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 which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly."

The market reacted positively to the news, with Block's shares rising by nearly 30 percent in extended trading following the announcement.