US tech employment had its worst start to the year since 2023, with AI blamed for tens of thousands of brutal job cuts, according to a new report.
The first three months of 2026 saw 52,050 tech layoffs — a 40% jump from the same period last year, executive coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas said in a report published Thursday.
Artificial intelligence is increasingly being blamed for the cuts.
In March, AI led the list of reasons employers gave for tech layoffs — accounting for 15,341 of the firings, or 25% of the total. Just a month earlier, the figure was 10%.
Last week, Oracle announced thousands of layoffs amid declining stock prices while taking on debt for AI investments.
Meta said in March it was planning sweeping layoffs — with 20% of its workforce, or about 15,000 employees, on the chopping block, according to Reuters.
The drastic cuts were reportedly intended to offset the company’s massive investments in AI.
In January, Amazon said it would axe 16,000 corporate employees, with the company suggesting AI will do their work, instead.
That came on top of news in October that the online retailer was axing 14,000 corporate workers.
Dell in the first three months of the year cut 11,000 jobs, accounting for the biggest tech bloodbath at one company while layoffs at other firms were still unfolding, according to Challenger.
“Companies are shifting budgets toward AI investments at the expense of jobs. The actual replacing of roles can be seen in technology companies, where AI can replace coding functions,” said Challenger, Gray & Christmas chief revenue officer Andy Challenger.
“Other industries are testing the limits of this new technology, and while it can’t replace jobs completely, it is costing jobs.”
Tech leaders have been sounding the alarm for months.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei wrote in January that AI would wipe out about half of all white collar jobs within one to five years.
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas recently landed in hot water after he argued on a podcast last month that people should embrace being replaced by artificial intelligence since they don’t like their jobs, anyway.
At Block, CEO Jack Dorsey blamed a recent round of 4,000 layoffs — a whopping 40% of the company’s workforce — on the emerging technology, warning of more to come.
“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,” he wrote on X. “And that’s accelerating rapidly.”
The first quarter of the year saw 217,362 job cuts across all industries — the lowest quarterly total since 2022, according to challenger. The tally was down 16% from the final quarter of 2025 and down 56% from the first quarter of 2025.
Other than AI, employers citing closings, restructurings and economic conditions as the reasons for layoffs so far this year.
Across all sectors, U.S.-based employers announced 60,620 job cuts in March alone, up 25% from February, according to challenger.
It said tech accounted for 18,720 of the March layoffs.
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