AI now accounts for 120,136 US job cuts in nine months, double last year's figure

US employers cited artificial intelligence as the reason for 120,136 job cuts between January and September of this year. That is double the previous year's total. The headline goes further and calls AI the leading cause of layoffs. The note we received does not give the full set of causes, so we can't confirm the ranking ourselves.

One caveat: these numbers record the reason employers state, not an independent audit. Some companies blame AI for cuts they would have made anyway. Citing automation can sound more strategic to investors than admitting a slowdown.

Our reading: even allowing for that inflation, the trend matches what we've been tracking sector by sector. The pressure lands first on back-office and administrative work, while jobs that rely on judgment, relationships and physical presence hold up better. The short-term transition is hard, and doubling in a year is no anecdote. It calls for retraining, a safety net and data that separates real automation from convenient storytelling. In the long term, we still believe the same productivity can fund abundance and let people do work they care about. That doesn't happen automatically, though. It depends on how the gains are shared.