Meta will cut about 8,000 positions starting May 20, while OpenAI plans to nearly double its headcount by the end of the year, highlighting a growing gulf in technology between companies that cut jobs and those that build the AI systems that drive them.
The layoffs, which affect about 10% of Meta’s 79,000 employees, come after more than 95,000 technology workers have lost their jobs in more than 240 separate events so far in 2026, according to data tracked by TrueUp.
The company cut 78,000 to 91,000 jobs in the first quarter alone, compared to about 30,000 in the same period last year.
Companies directly point to artificial intelligence as the reason.
Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that projects that once required large teams can now be handled by “one very talented person.” Salesforce chief Marc Benioff said the company’s support staff was reduced from 9,000 to about 5,000 “because we needed fewer people.” Amazon’s Andy Jassy told employees that the company expects new AI tools to “improve efficiency and reduce the company’s overall workforce.”
Prediction markets call metacuts before official news
Investors in prediction markets had seen Mehta’s cuts coming even before Friday’s Reuters report. At Polymarket, a betting platform backed by Intercontinental Exchange, traders put about $112,000 into the market while tracking Meta’s employee numbers and stock price. In a given market, there is a 96% chance that Meta will end the quarter with more than 75,000 employees, and a 55% chance that it will have more than 77,000 employees.
Polymarket’s broad tech layoff market remains at 79% and is expected to increase throughout the month. Competing platform Kalshi has a similar market, with over $30 million in stakes.
Traders see the layoffs as positive news. Another poll shows Meta stock has a 79% chance of rising above $700 in April. When news of the layoffs first broke, Meta’s stock price rose about 3%. Bank of America set a price target of $885 and expected annual savings from the restructuring to be between $7 billion and $8 billion.
OpenAI goes in the opposite direction with its hiring drive
While traditional technology companies are cutting back, OpenAI is moving in the opposite direction. The Financial Times reported on Saturday that the company plans to increase the number of employees from 4,500 to 8,000 by the end of 2026. Most of the new employees will work in product development, engineering, research and sales. The company’s latest funding round valued it at $840 billion. As previously reported by Cryptopolitan, OpenAI has its own recruitment platform that will be released in mid-2026.
Meanwhile, rival CEO Dario Amodei has spent months warning that engineering jobs, especially coding jobs, could disappear sooner than expected. “I think the coding will either go away first, or the coding will be done by AI models first,” he said recently. He predicted that 90 percent of the code in many companies could soon be written by AI, saying, “In 12 months, basically all the code will be written by AI.”
Amodei noted that changes are already occurring within Anthropic. Some engineering leaders no longer write their own code, only reviewing what AI generates. He warned that “entire jobs and careers that we’ve spent decades building may not exist.”
Still, Anthropic’s careers page currently shows approximately 436 open positions. The largest hiring area is Sales, with 150 open positions, followed by AI Research & Engineering with 68 positions, including full-stack software engineer and performance engineer positions. Some jobs pay salaries between $320,000 and $405,000.
A survey of more than 750 chief financial officers conducted by Duke Bank and the Federal Reserve found that more than 80% reported zero productivity gains from AI, even though the same survey predicted approximately 502,000 AI-related job cuts in 2026, nine times as many as in 2025.
Meta will report first quarter earnings on April 29th. Then comes the wave of layoffs on May 20th. How both events unfold will determine whether the AI efficiency story holds or breaks.
