Workers just sent AI companies an ultimatum
Since the AI hiring correction took hold, tens of thousands of employees have watched their jobs disappear, despite the companies that cut them posting some of the strongest earnings in their history. Oracle (ORCL) eliminated 21,000 positions over the past year, even as its full-year adjusted ...
Overview
Since the AI hiring correction took hold, tens of thousands of employees have watched their jobs disappear, despite the companies that cut them posting some of the strongest earnings in their history.
Oracle (ORCL) eliminated 21,000 positions over the past year, even as its full-year adjusted earnings per share jumped 27%.
Salesforce (CRM) cut jobs across three separate rounds since September 2025, while its AI platform, Agentforce, grew revenue 205%.
Block trimmed its workforce nearly in half, and Meta laid off 8,000 people while pushing its annual capital expenditure guidance as high as $135 billion to build out its AI infrastructure.
That contrast, record profits next to shrinking headcounts, has now shown up in polling. A new survey suggests most Americans are done waiting for tech companies to fix it themselves.
Two companies, same AI job-cut playbook
Oracle’s headcount fell from 162,000 to 141,000 over the past fiscal year, a 13% reduction.
Severance costs jumped to $1.8 billion from $374 million, even as remaining performance obligations, a measure of future contracted revenue, rose 325% to $553 billion. Oracle’s stock is down more than 10% for the year.
Salesforce told a similar story from the other side of the enterprise software market. The company cut roughly 4,000 customer support roles in late 2025, another round in January, and 86 more in June.
CEO Marc Benioff said the company needed fewer people because AI agents were handling the work.
Agentforce, Salesforce’s AI product, crossed $1.2 billion in annualized revenue, up 205% year over year, while the stock fell more than 30% this year, the worst performance in the Dow Jones Industrial Average.
Most Americans now want a cut of AI’s profits
Sixty-nine percent of U.S. adults support forcing AI firms to transfer half their stock into a public sovereign wealth fund, according to a survey of 1,690 people conducted by research firm Verasight.
That is not a fringe opinion. It is a supermajority backing what amounts to a government-mandated equity seizure.
Verasight CEO Benjamin Leff framed the appeal in plain terms, saying the public increasingly sees these funds as a mechanism to route AI’s gains back into the broader economy, according to CNBC.
The number lands squarely on top of a summer of headlines about layoffs tied to automation, and it reads less like abstract policy support and more like a direct response to what workers are watching happen around them.
Senator already introduced bill requiring stock levy on AI companies
The polling did not come out of nowhere.
Details
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act in June, proposing a one-time 50% stock levy on AI companies with more than $200 million in annual receipts, funneled into a fund Sanders estimates could start with roughly $7 trillion in assets.
“The future of AI and the fate of humanity must not be decided behind closed doors in Silicon Valley by billionaires seeking to maximize their power and profit,” Sanders said when he unveiled the bill.
Both Oracle's cloud business and Salesforce's Agentforce platform clear that $200 million revenue threshold many times over. This puts them squarely in the crosshairs of the proposed levy.
Related: Mark Cuban has strong words on AI companies and job losses
Goldman Sachs says the pain is real, just spread out
The layoffs driving this anger are not temporary noise.
Goldman Sachs senior economist Joseph Briggs estimates that more than 9% of the U.S. labor force, or roughly 15 million workers, could be displaced over a 10-year AI transition, according to Goldman Sachs Research.
More Layoffs:
- Microsoft cuts thousands as Xbox faces rude awakening
- Microsoft reportedly makes another brutal workforce move
- AI blamed for 21,000 layoffs at tech giant
Briggs argues most of that displacement should prove temporary as AI creates new categories of work, similar to past technology shocks in the late 1990s.
But he has also warned that if losses concentrate in a shorter window than expected, unemployment could rise faster than his base case allows, a risk that matters more to workers living through 2026 than to a model averaged over a decade.
Not everyone thinks a public stake in AI fixes this
Sovereign wealth funds can fund AI infrastructure directly, take equity in AI firms, or simply bank a share of the industry’s gains for taxpayers, according to Windfall Trust, a nonprofit that studies these structures.
But the group also flags a real conflict: a fund built to maximize returns might logically buy the best AI company on earth, even if that company is foreign, which cuts against the goal of building domestic capacity.
A Bloomberg opinion analysis goes further, arguing that handing the government both a regulatory role and an ownership stake in firms like Oracle and Salesforce creates a conflict of interest that could distort policy in either direction, toward propping up firms it owns or squeezing ones it doesn’t.
The bigger story is about who owns the AI upside
Oracle and Salesforce are not outliers. Microsoft has offered buyouts to 7% of its US workforce and Amazon has cut 16,000 corporate roles this year, all while pouring similar sums into AI infrastructure.
What makes Oracle and Salesforce distinct is how directly the math lines up: fewer people, faster AI revenue growth, and stock prices that have not rewarded either trade so far this year.
That is the pattern the Verasight survey is really responding to, and it is why the idea of public equity in AI, however unlikely to pass Congress this year, is not going away quietly.
The next earnings season will show whether either company’s bet on leaner payrolls pays off. Whether the public keeps demanding a cut of the winnings either way is the more interesting question.
Related: AI blamed for 21,000 layoffs at tech giant
Source
Originally published at www.thestreet.com.
