The CEO of payment giant Block (formerly Square), Jack Dorsey, recently announced the layoff of approximately 4,000 employees, nearly half of the company's total workforce. In a letter to shareholders, Dorsey clearly stated that the rationale for the layoffs came from a productivity leap brought about by AI, saying, "Smaller teams using AI tools can accomplish more and better work."

However, this view has been met with a collective backlash from current and laid-off employees. Several employees who spoke in interviews said that Dorsey's interpretation of AI's potential was seriously misleading, even having a "performative" quality.

Dorsey hopes to transform the company into a "mini AGI (Artificial General Intelligence)" and claims that Anthropic's Opus 4.6 and OpenAI's Codex 5.3 have brought a breakthrough. However, engineers pointed out that 95% of AI-generated code still requires significant manual modifications and does not meet the company's standards.

Laid-off employees revealed that over the past nine months, the company forced employees to frequently use and train internal AI tools. Employees felt they were being asked to "teach robots how to make themselves unemployed," but in reality, these tools proved ineffective when handling complex financial regulations and strategic visions.

Some employees believe that the layoffs were not truly due to AI being strong enough, but rather because Dorsey, after the company's stock price dropped due to fluctuations in cryptocurrency investments, wanted to regain investor confidence by awkwardly shifting the company's narrative from "cryptocurrency" to "AI."

After the large-scale layoffs, remaining employees fell into a "survival mode" with a sharp increase in workload. At the same time, customers became angry at the poor performance of AI chatbots (such as suggesting customers close their accounts to solve minor issues), feeling that AI lacks human judgment and emotional intelligence.

Although Dorsey claimed that per capita code output has increased by 40% since last September, employees generally feel "AI fatigue" and believe that this top-down technology transformation is leading to the loss of the company's accumulated expertise and talent.