But the reality is a bit more complicated. Companies are citing AI in some layoffs, but the looming AI jobspocalypse doesn’t seem to be here yet.

Of the 1.2 million job cuts at US companies announced in 2025 — yes, nearly double the 2024 total — AI is cited as the cause of 55,000, or 4.5%, of them, according to research firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. And in some cases the connection to AI may be exaggerated: Companies may make ambiguous moves in the development of AI as a way to justify layoffs made for other reasons, or make layoffs in premature anticipation of AI efficiencies — practices gained that market research firm Forrester recently called “AI-washing.” Meanwhile, a a new report from the Yale Budget Lab suggests that the idea of ​​AI operating in the job market “remains largely speculative.”

And indeed, some of the biggest rounds of layoffs so far this year—1,700 at Dutch semiconductor supplier ASML and 14,000 at Amazon—don’t appear to be directly due to AI automation, but rather boring business fundamentals like cutting corporate bloat, in companies reporting healthy growth.

That’s not much commitment to the workforce. The trickle, trickle, trickle of layoffs at highly profitable companies like ASML and Amazon destroy the morale of the remaining workforce and contribute to a growing sense that—due to AI or not—no job is safe.

Boomtime layoffs

ASML is a notable winner from the AI ​​race, as a maker of lithography equipment that prints small circuit patterns on silicon wafers and the only company that provides the cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet or EUV systems used for the most advanced chips. Last year it saw a 16% jump in total net sales from the previous year, as well as a 19% increase in gross profit.

But despite its growth, AI-powered revenues, ASML announced 1,700 job cuts in late January, explaining: “As shown in our FY 2025 financial results, we chose to make these changes one-time.” ASML chief financial officer Roger Dassen says the layoffs will cut bloat and reduce waste and unsightly layers. “We want to make sure that engineers become engineers again,” he told reporters.

At the same time, Amazon’s rise from AI — its fourth-quarter earnings beat analyst forecasts, boosted by 24% revenue growth in its AWS unit that supports AI — isn’t enough to save jobs from the chopping block. In late January, Amazon announced that it was cutting 16,000 positions completion which announced 14,000 job cuts in October.

CEO Andy Jassy in June issued a company-wide memo which said Amazon expects to reduce the overall corporate workforce “as we gain efficiency gains from the use of AI across the company.” Later, after Amazon laid off the first round of workers, he said the cuts were driven by “culture” and “many more layers” because of years of rapid growth. Amazon is looking to cut costs wherever it can as it pours money into its rapidly building AI data center infrastructure. During its earnings call, the company said it expects capital expenditures to rise to $200 billion this year, 60% from last year and more than Wall Street had expected. (Parts of it initially fell as a result.)

These layoffs at generally healthy companies may be “a bit of a hangover effect from what was a hot labor market a few years ago, when there was intense competition for talent,” said Chris Martin, lead researcher on Glassdoor’s economic research team. “That’s why you hear companies in these cases saying they want to streamline, or remove layers of bureaucracy or management, or cut bloat. These are companies that are doing well, but they decide to improve profitability by removing some headcount.

Toll cuts take away workers

Of course, that reasoning doesn’t ease workers’ feelings of anxiety because it suggests that AI isn’t the only job killer they have to worry about. And that worry is worth keeping in mind for business leaders considering taking a pay cut. Layoffs at companies with strong bottom lines can be “blindside” employees, and the damage done to worker morale is indistinguishable from the impact of layoffs at a struggling company, Martin said, citing Glassdoor research.

That “drip, drip, drip” method of layoffs can also demotivate workers. Martin and his team flagged a trend at the end of last year: the “eternal deletion” or layoffs that “come in endless waves instead of tsunamis.” Amazon’s downsizing in January, which followed a reshuffle in October, can feel to workers like “a continuous drumbeat of cuts and layoffs,” Martin said — not a recipe for a happy company culture.

“It has a compounding effect on engagement,” he said, “because you get knocked down in the first layoff and just as you get back up, there’s another wave, and it’s hard for employees to recover from that.”

Beth Galetti, Amazon’s vice president of people experience and technology, seemed to anticipate workers’ concerns about successive waves of layoffs. “Some of you may be asking if this is the beginning of a new rhythm—where we’re announcing broad declines every few months,” he wrote in a blog post. “That’s not our plan.”

It’s an open question whether Amazon employees buy that message. In recognition of the trend of “permanent layoffs”, Glassdoor’s research also found another, called the “big employee-leader divide”: The growing leverage of bosses makes workers “very skeptical of what their leaders say and the decisions they make.”

Clarification, Feb. 10, 2026: This article has been updated to clarify Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s comments following the company’s layoffs.