150,000 TECH WORKERS FIRED IN FIVE MONTHS AS COMPANIES POUR LAYOFF SAVINGS INTO AI — AND THE CUTS ARE ACCELERATING The American technology industry has now shed nearly 150,000 jobs in the first five months of 2026, approaching in just five months what took all of last year to accumulate. Cloudflare cut 1,100 workers, about 20 percent of its entire global staff. Coinbase let go of 700 people, roughly 14 percent of its workforce. Cisco announced 4,000 cuts. Upwork eliminated a quarter of its employees. Every one of those companies pointed to AI as the central driver. Companies are not just replacing workers with AI tools. They are restructuring entire organizations around the assumption that AI will soon close the gap on human output, even before the evidence supports that conclusion. Researchers at MIT studying thousands of worker task evaluations found agents are not yet performing at human quality on most work. The National Bureau of Economic Research found that workers perceive AI productivity gains as larger than measured gains actually are. A Harvard Business Review study found that when everyone uses AI to produce more, the bottleneck simply shifts to executives who must now authorize all of it. Productivity claims are outrunning proof, but the layoffs are real. At the current pace, 2026 is on track to become the worst year for tech employment since the dot-com collapse. The people being cut are not getting called back. Keywords: tech layoffs 2026 AI, AI job cuts technology sector, Cloudflare Coinbase layoffs, AI workforce displacement