The first batch of employees laid off by AI at major tech companies have already returned to work.

Author: Golem, Odaily Planet Daily

The first batch of employees laid off by AI have already returned to work.

On February 27th, Block, the fintech company founded by Jack Dorsey (founder of Twitter), laid off more than 4,000 employees, reducing its total workforce from 10,000 to less than 6,000. Dorsey cited "AI tools changing everything" as the reason for the layoffs. While it's widely acknowledged that AI will eventually eliminate some jobs, the fact that it's initially replacing mid- to high-level white-collar workers has exacerbated workplace anxiety.

However, less than a month later, some of the laid-off employees had already received invitations to return to work...

According to Business Insider, these rehired employees came from multiple departments, including engineering and recruitment. A design engineer at Block posted on LinkedIn that a management member told him he had been laid off in error due to a "clerical error" ; an HR person stated in a now-deleted post that he was rehired only after his manager repeatedly advocated for him ; and others claimed they received a call from Block a week after being laid off and were asked to return.

Jack has not yet publicly responded to the rehiring of employees. Judging from the proportion, these rehired employees only account for a small portion of the employees who were initially laid off, but it may already illustrate the problem: for some positions and jobs, AI is not as effective as a human.

From the perspective of usage costs, the cost of an enterprise-level AI employee is definitely higher than that of a regular human employee .

Hiring people to do the work costs money, while hiring AI to do the work costs tokens. The standard base price for Claude Opus 4.6 is $5 per 1 million tokens for input and $25 per 1 million tokens for output. Larger domestic models are even cheaper. The standard base price for Qwen 3.5 plus is 0.8 yuan per 1 million tokens for input and 4.8 yuan per 1 million tokens for output.

Take the recently popular OpenClaw as an example. A senior "shrimp farmer" within Odaily Planet Daily stated that he only used OpenClaw as a life and investment research assistant, and burned through approximately $6,000 in tokens in just over a month (he was using the Claude 4.5/4.6 model). $6,000 a month—what kind of highly educated person couldn't afford that (excluding Europe and America)?

If this is the case for personal use, the cost of integrating AI into enterprise operations is even higher. Take the simplest example of customer service replacement: in some areas with inflation in education levels, you can hire a good-looking college student as a customer service representative for 3,000 yuan. However, training an AI customer service representative who can truly replace human customer service, handle complex work orders, access multiple knowledge bases, conduct multi-round dialogues, and be stably online will definitely cost far more than 3,000 yuan per month.

In 2024, Swedish payment company Klarna announced a high-profile layoff of over 1,000 employees, claiming that AI customer service could replace the workload of 700 customer service agents. However, in May 2025, Bloomberg and other media outlets reported that Klarna had begun hiring again for customer service, and its CEO even admitted that they had indeed "moved too fast" in AI.

Furthermore, the replacement of human labor by AI also presents the "Jevens Paradox" .

Jevons' paradox is a concept in economics that states that increased efficiency does not necessarily lead to a decrease in the use of a particular resource. On the contrary, due to lower usage costs and increased demand, total usage may increase. Applying this theory to the workplace in the AI ​​era, when advancements in AI technology increase employee efficiency, companies will not allow employees to rest; instead, they will require them to complete more tasks per unit of time.

The so-called efficiency improvement has turned into another, more insidious, increase in workload; the idea that AI liberates human resources is a complete scam .

Capitalists might also believe that in the AI ​​era, companies won't need so many employees, as Jack said, "smaller teams with more intelligent tools." But what's the reality? The current situation is that after layoffs, AI doesn't completely take over the original jobs; rather, the remaining employees are increasing their workload with the help of AI.

If it were just a simple work task, that would be fine. But you have to understand that a company is ultimately a human organization. Where there is organization, there is a "world of its own." AI can integrate into the formal organization of a company, but it can never understand or integrate into the informal/invisible organization of a company .

So when AI lays off employees, it's not just the workforce that's being cut, but also the organizational muscle. The remaining employees not only have an increased workload, but they also swallow up the anxiety, risks, and responsibilities of their original positions. There are fewer collaborators, fewer executors, and most importantly, fewer people to take the blame.

During Nvidia's GTC 2026, Jensen Huang criticized companies that used AI to improve efficiency as a reason for layoffs in an interview. " Those leaders who rely on layoffs to deal with AI are simply because they can't think of any better solutions. They have run out of new ideas. Even if they get powerful tools, they won't use them to expand, " Huang said.

What Huang Renxun meant was that AI isn't meant to eliminate employees, but rather to help companies expand and develop new businesses. Instead of layoffs, companies should increase hiring. If management doesn't realize this, they're fools. But jokes aside, corporate managers are usually extremely astute; they certainly understand the current high cost of AI and the continued necessity of human resources.

Tech companies are laying off employees; perhaps AI is just a pretext, and cost reduction is the real purpose.

AI has become a go-to excuse for tech companies to lay off employees. In reality, AI isn't eliminating individuals, but rather businesses and operations still stuck in the old ways. When companies fail to keep pace with AI advancements, leading to stagnant business growth and shrinking profits, the AI ​​revolution becomes a new tool for companies to manipulate employees: reducing staff, cutting costs, and dumping more work on those who remain, then forcing everyone to reflect on why they couldn't become more adaptable to the AI ​​era.

If, unfortunately, a major workforce is laid off, the person can simply be quietly brought back. This method of layoffs is also common in Silicon Valley. After Musk completed the acquisition of Twitter in October 2022, he laid off about half of the employees (more than 3,000 people) in early November. Later, due to the wrong people being laid off or the discovery that key positions could not be filled without staff, he brought back dozens of the laid-off employees.

Returning to the present, while AI will undoubtedly change many things, it's not so magical as to compensate for strategic sluggishness, operational aging, or managerial laziness. The phenomenon of employees being laid off and then rehired due to AI, whether the underlying reason is that companies realize some jobs won't automatically disappear with a simple "AI has changed everything," or it's merely an excuse to cut costs, is neither inspiring nor a game-changer.

It just shows us that before the future has truly arrived, some people have already been hurt by it once.