Story perspectives

AI Sparks Wave of Internet Layoffs, Meta, Amazon Cut 24K

7/7/2026

Summary

Tech Firms Layoffs

In Q2 2026, internet firms laid off staff at “630” mark, citing AI.
Engineer Lin Yue and Meituan Cang Shu were dismissed despite high ratings.
Stanford research reported a 20% drop in software-developer jobs for 22-25 after ChatGPT spread in 2022.
Meta and Amazon together cut 24,000 jobs to fund AI.
Meituan’s 2025 spend of 200 billion yuan spurred layoffs, with workers joining AI startups or roles.

Summary

Meituan AI

Meituan CEO Wang Xing told managers AI agents reshaped his work, promising gains.
Meituan launched Lobster AI, logging daily tasks as reusable Skills and issuing efficiency reports.
Chen Yujia said leaders vague on AI’s role but demand no one fall behind, tightening layoff lists linked to AI use.
HR halted AI-generated hourly reports after employee pushback, noting Alibaba’s report of an engineer’s 17 billion-token month that sparked consideration of token-consumption rankings.

Summary

Li Chuan Laid-off

Rapid AI coding advances have made programmers the group most vulnerable to layoffs, with managers often deeming front-end and test-engineering roles devalued.
Li Chuan, front-end engineer at Baidu (09888.HK), said Claude Code’s early-2026 performance shocked him.
After Zhipu’s April GLM-5.1 release, Li felt his job was at risk and was laid off in May.
Anthropic’s May-2026 revenue of $47 billion coincided with Zhipu’s valuation rising above the trillion-yuan level after GLM-5.1.

Summary

Alibaba AI Mandate

Alibaba in May created a Full-Stack Task Force and halted non-urgent requests, forcing product managers to use AI agents while programmers only edit those agents.
Meituan merged front-end and back-end development in June, removing specialist tracks.
Tencent’s CSIG deployed an AI bug-fix tool where engineers confirm fixes, now at 50% accuracy.
Tencent set a $2,000 token quota, allowing unused tokens to be lent and counting usage in performance reviews.

History

Historical Context

After IBM’s Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, the company pursued a new challenge and built Watson, which won the 2011 Jeopardy! tournament and earned a $1 million prize. Watson’s $4 billion health-care effort was sold for $1 billion in 2022, and its early triumph now inspires Chinese firms such as Alibaba and Tencent to automate coding jobs, prompting regulatory scrutiny.

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Tech Firms Layoffs

In Q2 2026, internet firms laid off staff at “630” mark, citing AI.
Engineer Lin Yue and Meituan Cang Shu were dismissed despite high ratings.
Stanford research reported a 20% drop in software-developer jobs for 22-25 after ChatGPT spread in 2022.
Meta and Amazon together cut 24,000 jobs to fund AI.
Meituan’s 2025 spend of 200 billion yuan spurred layoffs, with workers joining AI startups or roles.

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