Tech CEOs Blame AI for 52,000 Layoffs While Filing H-1B Visa Petitions
Tech companies cut 52,000 jobs in Q1 2026 while filing thousands of H-1B visa petitions, as executives cite AI and critics question whether the technology is a genuine driver or a convenient excuse.
The single mother who lost her tech job last week probably wasn't expecting career advice from a billionaire CEO. She got it anyway.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas ignited viral outrage when he told an audience of tech executives that displaced workers should embrace the "glorious future" of entrepreneurship because "most people don't enjoy their jobs." The comment came just hours after Oracle announced 30,000 layoffs while simultaneously filing 3,126 H-1B visa petitions for foreign workers.
Srinivas made the remarks during a March 30 appearance on the All-In podcast at Nvidia's GTC conference. "The reality is most people don't enjoy their jobs," he said. "There's suddenly a new possibility, a new opportunity, to use these tools, learn them, and start your own mini business. Even if there is temporary job displacement to deal with, that sort of glorious future is what we should look forward to."
His comments drew immediate backlash across social media platforms. One user posted: "A man worth millions just told the single mother who lost her job that she should be grateful because now she can start a business using his product and called her unemployment a glorious future."
The outburst landed against a backdrop of devastating job loss figures. Tech companies eliminated 52,050 positions in the first quarter of 2026 — a 40 percent increase from the same period last year, according to employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Artificial intelligence was cited as the leading reason for 15,341 job cuts across all industries in March alone, representing 25 percent of total March reductions.
Yet that pattern has raised what industry observers call "AI washing" — executives blaming artificial intelligence for cuts that would have occurred regardless. Oracle offers the sharpest illustration. The software giant eliminated 20,000 to 30,000 positions globally, roughly 18 percent of its 162,000-person workforce, while filing 3,126 H-1B petitions for foreign workers during the 2025–2026 fiscal year.
India's largest Oracle hub absorbed the heaviest blow, with 12,000 layoffs. Meanwhile, Oracle secured $58 billion in debt over the past two months and plans to invest $50 billion in AI data centers during the current fiscal year.
Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen put into words what many industry insiders were already thinking. "Essentially every large company is overstaffed," Andreessen told Fortune magazine in March. "It's at least overstaffed by 25 percent. I think most large companies are overstaffed by 50 percent. I think a lot of them are overstaffed by 75 percent. Now they all have the silver bullet excuse: Ah, it's AI."
Andreessen challenged the technological justification directly. "AI literally until December was not actually good enough to do any of the jobs that they're actually cutting," he said. "It just can't have been AI."
The Oracle case mirrors a broader trend across Silicon Valley. Amazon eliminated 30,000 corporate positions between October 2025 and January 2026 while filing 2,675 H-1B petitions during the same period. Block CEO Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 jobs — 40 percent of his company's workforce — explicitly citing AI as the reason.
"Intelligence tools have changed what it means to build and run a company," Dorsey wrote in a memo. "A significantly smaller team, using the tools we're building, can do more and do it better."
Meta trimmed approximately 700 positions from its Reality Labs division while considering cuts affecting up to 20 percent of its workforce, or roughly 15,000 employees. Pinterest eliminated 15 percent of its staff citing AI strategy, and Dow Chemical cut 4,500 positions while announcing a shift to automation.
Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has suggested some companies are using AI as a convenient scapegoat. He told CNBC-TV18 that executives engage in "AI washing" by blaming the technology for cuts that would have happened regardless of technological advancement.
Perplexity defended its CEO's comments through a spokesperson who pointed to broader economic trends. "Since Perplexity launched in December 2022, Americans have filed 16 million new business applications," the statement read. "This contributed to the reversal of a 40-year decline and proves yet again that breakthrough technologies don't eliminate opportunity, they create it."
For the workers now navigating that transition, the financial runway is short. Oracle's severance package offers just four weeks of base salary for the first year of employment, plus one week per subsequent year, capped at 26 weeks total. The company automatically cancels all unvested Restricted Stock Units for departing employees.
As tech executives tout the "glorious future" of AI-driven entrepreneurship, thousands of workers absorb the gap between boardroom rhetoric and the documented reality of cost-cutting and labor arbitrage — a gap that widens with every quarterly earnings report, and that no severance package comes close to bridging.