Automattic CEO Matt Mullenweg has been abruptly put on a paid leave of absence from the company by its board of directors, despite his objections. But enterprise IT executives who rely on WordPress may find the shift doesn’t mean much as long as Mullenweg fully controls WordPress.org, which handles all of the product’s patches and updates.

“The part of WordPress that actually keeps enterprise IT up at night isn’t Automattic’s org chart. It’s WordPress.org, the plugin and theme directory every WordPress site pulls its security updates from, and the WordPress trademark,” said Frank Dickson, principal analyst at Dickson Research. “Mullenweg owns and controls both personally, outside of Automattic, and nothing about this week’s vote touches that. He also remains a director on Automattic’s board. The company changed who runs its hosting business without changing who controls the distribution pipeline millions of those hosted sites still depend on.”

For IT leaders who rely on WordPress, it’s important to differentiate what is currently known about the change and what is speculation. A statement emailed to Computerworld from Automattic merely said: “Matt Mullenweg is currently on leave from Automattic. Mark Davies, Automattic’s CFO, will lead the company as interim CEO. The Board has full confidence in Mark’s leadership and in the team’s ability to execute against the company’s priorities.” 

However, messages from Mullenweg to Automattic employees made it clear that the move was one that he strongly opposed. He posted on his X account, “the next step in this playbook is to restart the smear attacks, so get ready for some National Enquirer rumors or hit pieces.”

He added: “I appreciate the hundreds of colleagues who have already expressed public and private support, and are organizing in solidarity. It’s a big help to counter the ‘Matt is an idiot and shouldn’t run an ice cream stand’ allegations. Also, whatever you can say about me, I’m direct and probably overcommunicate, which I’m going to continue doing through this mess folks have made.”

He also posted separately that he is looking to hire, but that applicants cannot be current Automattic employees. “I really need some great sysadmin and security researchers to hire really quick, no one from @automattic. I’m on the board there and fully support Mark Davies in his interim CEO role. But I think it’s probably good if I move some of my stuff currently hosted there, elsewhere.”

Next steps unclear

What is unclear are likely next steps. Is the leave permanent or temporary? And if temporary, how temporary? Is the board negotiating with Mullenweg, and might those negotiations involve whether Mullenweg continues to control WordPress.org? Neither Automattic nor Mullenweg provided clarification.

Melody Brue, analyst-in-residence at Moor Insights & Strategy, who has closely tracked WordPress for years, said that the apparent speed of Mullenweg’s removal as Automattic CEO suggests that the board was trying to sidestep something serious.

“It has to be some exposure or risk that was severe enough that speed outweighed any optics or fairness. Boards don’t generally move that abruptly,” she said. The appointment of the CFO as interim CEO “definitely shows some stabilization and possibly some legal compliance cleanup. What it doesn’t say is renewed product investment.”

IT worried about instability

But the longstanding worries among CIOs about WordPress were not primarily about the perceived lack of continued investment. It was the concern that Mullenweg has a tendency to react strongly to a situation, apparently without many thoughts of the consequences. 

Nothing better illustrated this than Mullenweg’s personal war with WordPress hosting provider WP Engine that resulted in a series of legal rulings in WP Engine’s favor. 

WP Engine litigation is still ongoing, and that may have played a role in the board’s actions. 

Part of that lawsuit is at the heart of enterprise IT concerns: Mullenweg had denied WP Engine access to WordPress.org resources, including patches, plugins and security updates for the software. 

The IT fear is that Mullenweg could unilaterally take similar actions against any customer, even an enterprise. 

“I would still treat this as vendor risk, because WordPress.org is still controlled by Matt, separate from Automattic,” Brue said. “The question is, who actually controls the plugins that these IT leaders rely on? It’s still a structural risk. Look at whether the patches flow through one person. For now, they still do. Is that pipeline protected by independent governance, oversight? That is what matters for enterprise IT.”

Flavio Villanustre, CISO at the LexisNexis Risk Solutions Group, agreed. 

“Most of the concerns from enterprises about using WordPress come from the fragmented ecosystem and the inconsistent security controls and support of modules and extensions, which have led to significant vulnerabilities in the past,” Villanustre said. “The change of CEO in their parent company won’t directly affect this, especially because Matt Mullenweg will continue as the WordPress[.org] leader anyway.”

Dickson also agreed, noting that the question of who sits in the CEO seat at Automattic was not the issue.

“The enterprise IT concern was never really about Automattic’s management bench. It was about one person holding unilateral, unaccountable control over a piece of critical open-source infrastructure,” he said. “In 2024, Mullenweg used exactly that control to cut WP Engine’s customers off from plugin and theme updates overnight, with no board sign-off and no customer input, purely as leverage in a business dispute. This week’s vote proves a board can restrain him inside Automattic. It says nothing about what restrains him at WordPress.org, because the honest answer is still nothing.”

In fact, rather than reducing those IT worries, Dickson argued that this move could worsen them. 

“If anything, this should sharpen the concern rather than settle it. A board just decided it couldn’t function with him running a corporate entity with ordinary fiduciary obligations,” he pointed out. “That same person still holds sole authority over the update pipeline for software that runs over 40% of the web. Risk teams that were nervous about concentration risk in WordPress now have a fresh, concrete data point: the concentration is real, and untouched by whatever just happened at Automattic’s board table.”

This change could help

Mike Wilkes, enterprise CISO at Aikido Security, interpreted the events differently, and suggested that it might indeed make WordPress look more attractive to enterprise IT.

“This could ultimately make WordPress more attractive to enterprise buyers, but only if it becomes the beginning of stronger institutional governance rather than simply a change in personalities,” he said. “CIOs don’t particularly care about palace intrigue until that intrigue can affect software updates, supply-chain dependencies or business continuity. The WP Engine conflict demonstrated that governance risk can become operational risk surprisingly quickly. The ongoing litigation underscores that this is not merely historical baggage.”

Wilkes pointed out that the next few steps taken by the board and by Mullenweg will likely be far more informative than any analysis of the board’s CEO change.

“I wouldn’t tell a CIO that yesterday’s announcement makes WordPress either safer or riskier today. I would tell them to watch what happens next,” he said. “If Automattic uses this moment to create clearer separation between corporate interests, WordPress.org infrastructure, and community governance, it could reduce one of the ecosystem’s most persistent concentration risks. If the same authority simply migrates to different individuals without structural reform, enterprise concerns haven’t really changed. In cybersecurity terms, replacing the administrator isn’t the same thing as eliminating the single point of failure.”

Dylan Forde, owner of Harmonic Design in Oakville, Ontario, Canada, and a WordPress developer for more than ten years, applauded the CEO change. 

“It is my opinion that the removal of Mr. Mullenweg is a good thing for both the WordPress community and open source,” he said. “He has been divisive for a long time, with many grievances that I overall understand, but I oppose his responses to. It sucks to build something used by millions of people and businesses around the world, all profiting off your work while giving nothing back. But cutting off and targeting individuals is not the answer. Open source is supposed to work for everyone, and my assumption is that anyone whose core business relies on WordPress will be sleeping easier now.”

A slew of recent studies indicate that AI isn’t dramatically displacing workers. At the same time, there were no indicators that the fast-moving technology is creating a lot of jobs, even as AI skills remain in high demand.

Stanford University researchers in an August study found that any AI-related job declines were concentrated among young workers aged 22–25. But for older and more experienced workers that wasn’t the case.

“Claims of economy-wide AI-driven job losses are not visible in payroll data through June 2026,” the researchers said, citing ADP payroll information. Stanford partnered with ADP to conduct the research.

The decline for young workers is more often related to the automation of some work tasks by AI, as opposed to its use to complement work. In contrast, AI is more often used by experienced workers to augment what they do. 

According to the Stanford report, workers between 22 and 25 and employed in jobs highly exposed to disruption by AI are falling behind their older counterparts. Their employment levels in June were about 19% below the same age group in less-exposed occupations. That’s compared to where they would be if both groups had kept pace with each other.

“Experienced workers show no comparable gap,” the researchers said, adding that “this is consistent with recent reports of a worsening job market for entry-level workers.”

Employment of younger workers in AI-exposed jobs fell about 11% from late 2022, while the same age group in less-exposed jobs actually grew about 10%. “For older age groups, we find much less marked differences in employment growth across AI exposure quintiles,” the researchers said.

Stanford, which created a lab last year to study AI’s impact amid heightened fears of the technology’s economic effects, said its numbers were based on available indicators.

AI’s adverse impact on young workers has been well documented, with many of them laid off in the initial wave of AI automation. AI has also suppressed wages for entry-level workers.

AI was cited for 116,175 job cuts in 2026, but that number is declining. The technology  was blamed for 3,462 cuts in August, according to data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

It’s the “lowest monthly total since December 2025 when 142 cuts were attributed to AI,” the company wrote in a blog entry. The research firm also noted aggressive hiring plans for companies in 2027.

AI is adding value to companies in different ways, and humans are an important part of that process, said Michael Chui, a senior fellow at QuantumBlack, AI at McKinsey. “The night shift is real now,” he said. “People are sending off their agents to write code and checking in the morning.”

MIT late last year established an AI labor index to determine how agents are affecting the workforce. The school’s Project Iceberg looks at how the coordination and interaction with agentic AI changes how work is done.

Despite the disruptions, demand for AI-related talent continues to rise, tech industry consortium CompTIA said last week. About 320,000 job listings in August required AI-related capabilities, a 4.5% increase from July.

AI-related hiring is outperforming the broader tech market, with demand for AI skills up 96% year-over-year, said Kye Mitchell, head of Experis North America, which is part of ManpowerGroup.

“We’re seeing real growth…in marketing management and project management roles, suggesting employers are looking beyond the people building AI to the people applying it,” Mitchell said.

More broadly, the US economy added 162,000 jobs in August, according to US Department of Labor figures released last week. CompTIA noted that tech employment across all sectors rose by 86,000 workers in August.

But within the tech sector, 14,700 positions were cut, CompTIA said.

Swiss authorities have launched a pilot project to determine whether it is possible to replace Microsoft 365 with similar open-source services, RTS reports. This follows a proof-of-concept project in which 172 civil servants tested the German open-source platform openDesk.

According to Matthias Stürmer, a professor at the University of Bern, there are three main reasons for the switch: to reduce dependence on US services, to improve operational reliability, and to reduce costs.

In the first phase, the migration involves 3,000 computers, which corresponds to 7% of Switzerland’s federal workforce. The government has more than 54,000 workstations in operation. The pilot will prioritize employees who have access to highly sensitive data, according to RTS.

A move by the Swiss Armed Forces from Microsoft 365 to openDesk is already underway, with that migration expected to be completed in October, It’s FOSS reports.

Switzerland’s move is part of a larger ‘digital sovereignty’ effort in the European Union that aims to retain local control over data, applications, and infrastructure. In January, lawmakers directed the European Commission to map critical technology dependencies and then develop policies to reduce reliance on foreign providers.

This article originally appeared on Computer Sweden.

More on the EU’s digital sovereignty push:

• European tech leaders advise caution on tech sovereignty drive
• EuroStack: Europe’s path to digital independence?
• US orders diplomats to push back on data sovereignty

Back in April 2025, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) proudly proclaimed that it had prevailed in a landmark antitrust case against Google’s ad business. Yeah. Right.

You see, just last week, US District Judge Leonie M. Brinkema rejected the DoJ’s effort to force Google to sell its AdX ad exchange. What began as a major anti-monopoly victory has become a mouse-sized settlement. 

[ Google US antitrust trials: A timeline ]

Does any of this this sound familiar? It should. We’ve seen this show before. Last year, Google had also been convicted of abusing its search business. At first, all the talk was about how Google might be forced to divest itself of the Chrome browser and/or the Android operating system. 

Instead, Google was allowed to keep making search deals and only had to share some search data with its rivals. 

I say rivals, but in fact Google still dominates the search market. Indeed, its control has actually expanded a bit. By StatCounter’s numbers, in August 2025, Google search owned 89.89% of the market. By last month, almost a year after the company had been slapped on the wrist, its share had grown to 91.1%. 

Boy, wasn’t that a win?

The remedies phase of the government’s ad-tech antitrust case order is a similar Google win. No, it doesn’t overturn the April 2025 finding that Google unlawfully maintained monopolies in the publisher ad-server and ad-exchange markets, or that it illegally tied its ad server and exchange together. Instead, it determines how the company must change its conduct.

The DoJ wanted Google to divest itself of AdX, the company’s ad exchange for matching publisher inventory with advertiser demand. It also sought to require Google to open-source the final-auction logic in its DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) ad server and, if necessary, divest its DFP business. 

Brinkema rejected all three requests. Instead, her short order accepts “most” of the parties’ proposed behavioral remedies, subject to modifications described in a memorandum opinion that remains sealed while the parties identify confidential information for redaction.

Specifically, the court directed Google and the plaintiffs to meet and submit a joint proposed final judgment within 30 days. If they cannot agree on the details, each side must submit its own proposed version.

Google — as it should — sees this as a win. As Lee-Anne Mulholland, Google’s vice president of regulatory affairs, said in a statement, “We’re very pleased the Court rejected the DOJ’s proposal to break apart tools that help small businesses reach new customers and grow.”

Far less convincing is the DOJ’s characterizing the decision as a win. “The Antitrust Division is pleased that the court ordered substantial relief in the Google ad-tech case. We are one step closer to restoring competition and bringing relief for the American people in online advertising markets.” 

Oh please! It does nothing of the sort.

To quote Laurel Kilgour, research manager at the American Economic Liberties Project, an anti-monopoly, nonprofit group: “Judges keep finding Google guilty, but Google keeps walking away with both its ill-gotten gains and its empire intact. Without actual structural remedies, antitrust rulings are just inconvenient speed bumps that allow Google to lock down search and ad tech markets today while using that same unchecked power to monopolize tomorrow’s AI frontier.”

Exactly so. 

The specific obligations Google will face are not yet public, because Brinkema’s explanatory opinion remains under seal. Earlier, Google had proposed making real-time bidding responses from AdX available to rival ad servers, removing Unified Pricing Rules, and accepting a monitoring trustee for a three-year supervision period. None of that will even dent Google’s ad business.  

When all’s said and done, Google is still in charge of both its exchange and publisher ad-server operations. I expect the minor changes required won’t amount to a hill of beans. Restoring competition in markets where the company was found to have used its vertically integrated position unlawfully? Give me a break. 

Public Knowledge, a free speech and internet advocacy group, described the decision as one that leaves Google’s monopoly power substantially intact. 

As Public Knowledge Legal Director John Bergmayer said, “The court found that Google illegally acquired and maintained monopolies in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges, and used its control of DFP and AdX to shut out rivals.” He concluded, “Telling a monopolist to do better is not the same as restoring competition.… A finding of liability means little if the remedy leaves the market fundamentally unchanged.”

Ya think? 

In Google’s last reported quarter, the company reported $81.6 billion in advertising revenue. Next year, when Google is being “punished,” I expect its revenue will be even higher. 

The destiny of Spirit Airline’s data is still undecided, months after the company sought bankruptcy protection.

AI data company Micro1 has now offered $12.5 million to acquire a trove of the company’s emails, Teams chats, operations and employee productivity data, according to a report by aviation website Simply Flying,

It said the data includes about 600 million email and chat records generated by 17,000 employees, as well as 17 million OneDrive files, 20.5 million SharePoint items, and more than 30 million recorded customer service calls. Such a large repository of information is a gold mine to any company looking to train AI models more effectively. The report says that this data includes sensitive, decades-old employee and workplace records.

But Micro1’s offer comes weeks after Google acquired the data at auction, with its $10 million bid beating the $7.5 million offered by another AI training company, Mercor.

The airline’s former employees objected to the sale, and last week their unions took legal action to block the it.

Nelson, international president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA, which continues to represent more than 5,500 of Spirit’s flight attendants, told Forbes that former flight attendants were unhappy about Spirit attempting to cash in on sensitive data when they still have not been paid their accrued vacation time, sick leave, and outstanding compensation.

However, this type of personal data is extremely valuable to the likes of Google. It means that AI models can be trained in more realistic scenarios. One option that is being explored is whether the data can be anonymized, which may offer a way forward to keep both sides happy.

This article first appeared on CSO.

I came across a LinkedIn post the other day that described “hypegineering,” which the poster explained refers to the moment when AI “marketing becomes more innovative than the technology itself.”

That post came from Ralph Aboujaoude Diaz, the global head of GRC for British consumer services company Haleon. Until last year, Diaz worked in operations cybersecurity for consumer goods giant Philip Morris. 

In his post, Diaz added that “side effects may include believing mediocre tech is revolutionary, confusing hype with progress, buying solutions to problems you don’t have and defending it like your job depends on it.”

As amusing as that might seem, the problem is frighteningly real. The sad truth is that enterprise IT executives are partly — perhaps mostly — to blame for the current hype around AI.

For many decades, senior IT leaders (pre-dating when it was called MIS) were the technology hype-deflators with razor-shape BS detection skills. That level of skepticism was needed. Tech vendors have always exaggerated and left out critical context when they weren’t outright lying about their products. 

Enterprises trusted the IT gate-keepers to ferret out reality from the smoke and mirrors. 

But there was a critical difference back then: senior management (especially CEOs, CFOs and board members) didn’t pay much attention to tech. They wanted the benefits, but they left the details to IT management to sort things out. With senior managers, benign neglect can be an incredibly good thing. 

As much as we might all think that we want our bosses to really care about our efforts, be careful what you wish for. (For Dilbert fans, think of the pointy-haired boss; a boss who has strong beliefs but no understanding of technology is a nightmare.) 

Alas, that is the situation many enterprises find themselves in today. IT management fully understands the level of absurd hype coming from a multitude of AI players. But unlike years and technologies past (RFID? NFC? Biometrics?), deflating hype balloons is easier when it’s comes solely from vendors. When senior managers start spouting this garbage, IT’s hype-deflation ability morphs into contradicting the very people at the top of their own corporate food chain.

That forces IT leaders who want to stay gainfully employed to do a lot of what used to be called lying. “Well, boss, yes these agentic systems have guardrails that will block destruction,” the lie begins, “but we can’t anticipate what any user or attacker might say in a prompt.”

That’s far more corporate acceptable than the actual truth: “Boss, a guardrail that an agent can disregard isn’t a guardrail. It’s more of a mild suggestion.” 

Or IT could say, “Well, yes, boss, autonomous agents could exponentially increase efficiency — as long as you’re OK with the risk that they might send our internal data to the competition.”

For the sake of the company, tech leaders and decision-makers need to reassert themselves and perform serious reality checks on all AI efforts. But this is more fraught than merely contradicting a top boss. IT  could be seen as embarrassing that top boss by pretty much proving that they were either naive or ignorant enough to be conned by the hype. 

Telling them they’re wrong seems nicer than calling them stupid. And yet, someone in IT has to find a politically palatable way to do both. 

While the number of US jobs declined by 23,000 in July, employment in the tech sector rebounded as the AI revolution continues to gain steam.

The national unemployment numbers were reported Friday by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the same time, research firms said July was a good month for IT hiring compared to June.

According to CompTIA, which analyzed the BLS data, tech sector jobs rose in July by 3,700. In June, the IT sector had lost 900 jobs.

Companies last month hired in the cloud, hosting, information processing, data, and semiconductor manufacturing sectors, CompTIA said in a statement. 

“We’re entering a labor market where opportunity is increasingly concentrated around specific skills, industries, and investments,” said Ger Doyle, regional president of North America at ManpowerGroup, a labor consulting firm.

For example, data center hiring was up 39% in July compared to the same period last year, Doyle said. Not surprisingly, the data-center growth has been fueled by AI infrastructure needs and demand for hardware. That has helped increase the number of jobs in ancillary sectors such as transportation.

July hiring data showed heavy truck driver demand, which surged by 181% from June, Doyle said.

According to the BLS data, employment went up by 2.4% in the “computing infrastructure providers, data processing, web hosting, and related services” sectors, which is listed under the information sector.

Jobs in the “computer and electronic product manufacturing” sector — which is bunched under manufacturing — rose by 2.9% from June to July.

But bad news continued for the telecommunications sector, where the number of jobs declined by 1.5% from June to July. That continued a downward slide in recent years.

Overall job layoffs slowed in July, with 33,429 cuts announced; that’s down from 45,849 cuts announced in June, and the lowest since July 2024, according to data from Challenger, Gray and Christmas.

“Hiring has also increased over last year by 25%, so while AI is shifting the labor market, it is not dismantling it,” said Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

The tech sector announced 9,867 cuts in July, bringing the year-to-date total to 149,023 so far in 2026, according to Challenger figures.

Tech sector hiring and job losses vary as organizations use different measurement techniques to gauge the overall hiring environment. 

The top-line US unemployment rate declined to 4.1% from 4.2%, in part because of  workers leaving the workforce or not looking for jobs, indicating a slow labor market.

Still, hiring demand exists across the US, despite declining labor force participation and longer job searches, Doyle said.

Because technology underpins many of the changes occurring across sectors such as healthcare and services, employers are rethinking hiring.  “That’s why the labor market many workers are experiencing doesn’t always match the one described by the headline numbers,” Doyle said.

ADP’s National Employment report said only 44,000 jobs were added to private payrolls in July, with choppiness across sectors.

But demand for AI skills continues to rise, according to research firms that track growth by analyzing job listings. CompTIA noted that about 14,000 new job listings in July sought AI and machine learning skills.

It’s not clear how the ongoing AI boom may be hurting or helping human jobs. Many recent job cuts have been attributed to AI, though some companies have been accused of using the technology as a rationale for cuts they made for other reasons.

A recent OECD report said that even manual jobs once thought immune to AI are at risk of being taken over by robots. The OECD report said creative jobs — typically management, arts, and social work — will be least threatened by AI.

There are also increasing indications that successful AI deployments will require humans in the loop. For example, more consulting firms are using forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) to implement agentic AI. And smaller consultancy firms are finding more productivity by automating mundane work with AI and spending more time meeting client requirements.

Walking around Dubai, it’s hard to believe a war is still going on in neighboring countries.

No missiles have struck the city, and it was clear during a recent visit that local residents are keeping to their routines. The biggest public worry, as it has been in many parts of the world, is the extreme heat. (The high today is around 106 degrees.)

Dubai, one of seven emirates in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), continues to emerge as a major global tech hub and is on the verge of becoming a major AI powerhouse. Each of the emirates has their own laws and traditions, with Dubai and Abu Dhabi — the UAE capitol — the most prominent.

Other nations recognize the region’s potential and Dubai’s position. The US, for instance, showed interest in currying favor with the UAE by sending a CIA spy to vet the emirate’s top AI firm, paving the way for future chip and AI deals. That outreach, highlighted in a report in The Wall Street Journal, was a hot topic in the local tech community.

These days, Dubai and Abu Dhabi hope to position themselves as hubs where people and companies go for AI. It’s location makes it an excellent place to do business with connections to Asia, Europe and Africa.

Broadly speaking, the UAE wants to be something of a Switzerland for AI, or “a neutral AI corridor between East and West,” Mahmood Abdulla, a regional technology expert, explained in a 2025 LinkedIn entry.

Data center buildouts

While states like New York are putting a moratorium on the construction of data centers in the US, the UAE is moving in the opposite direction; an aggressive AI data center buildout has government backing.

Stargate UAE, a data center project that involves top tech firms such as OpenAI and Oracle, is being built in Abu Dhabi. The city has essentially planned out a business model designed to turn AI into hard cash with a focus on the energy resources that will play a major role in the effort.

The plan is to redirect Abu Dhabi’s vast energy resources — it has up to 100 billion barrels of known oil reserves — to data centers generating AI tokens. Those tokens can then be sold as compute resources to produce revenue.

With oil markets volatile because of ongoing conflicts and the worldwide rise of renewables, pushing energy use to AI data centers might be a more reliable form of revenue long term.

Will it work? That remains to be seen. But unlike the US backlash against data centers construction in many place, a ban here seems unlikely.

The entrepreneurial spirit

Technological innovations from entrepreneurs have been at the core of Dubai’s rapid growth in recent years as a global business center. Here, AI is already quietly woven into daily life, much as it is in China, where AI is already in factories, homes, and infrastructure.

One founder told me that naming his company to include “AI” is more of a US thing. UAE companies focus less on boasting about AI models and superintelligence; they tend to emphasize user experiences.

On a separate track, Dubai is already targeting the launch later this year of robotic air taxis flying from the airport into the city. (That’s ahead of New York City, where electric air taxis are still being tested.)

Still, Dubai is behind the US when it comes to autonomous ground transport. The first autonomous taxis hit Dubai streets just last year, and there are a limited number operating in tourist areas.

A complicating face tor for the area remains the Iran war. Dubai’s Internet City, a hub with buildings belonging to the likes of Microsoft, Oracle and IBM, largely emptied when the war started in late February. Foreign tech workers left, and property prices declined.

But the real estate market is booming as opportunistic investors buy low. Their bet: the US-Iran war won’t stop the UAE’s growth.

Money is flowing into the area in other ways. Heavy tax burdens in Western countries are pushing wealthy founders to move businesses to Dubai’s tax-free environments. And Dubai is opening the door to those with digital nomad and freelance visas. Although visas can cost thousands of dollars a year, lower rent and healthcare costs compared to the US can offset those costs.

Rivals are emerging, too

UAE’s economic rival, Saudi Arabia is also rising as a tech powerhouse. Riyadh has undertaken reforms at a rapid pace to become an attractive place to do business under its Vision 2030 program.

Saudi Arabia requires corporations to have regional headquarters in the country to win government contracts, a policy that challenges Dubai’s status as a regional business hub.

The UAE also relies heavily on immigrants and human labor, which can be both a plus as well as a challenge. There is no pathway for entrepreneurs or long-time tech workers to retire here, which can undermine worker motivations to stay.

Still, the attractive business environment, combined with local infrastructure and a skilled labor force, make this area appealing. As one founder told me, if the US doesn’t want its most skilled immigrants, the UAE will be happy to welcome them with open arms.

As newspapers move online, the buildings that once housed their printing presses need new occupants.

The Minnesota Star Tribune has just sold its old printing plant on the edge of Minneapolis to the aptly named property developer Legacy Investing, which plans to create a new data center there. has found the ideal way to bring them back to life.

This is the second such move by Legacy. It has already bought a building in downtown Minneapolis that it has transformed into a data center for artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

These old buildings, already connected to power, are an attractive option for developers — especially with some grid operators threatening power cuts for new-build data centers during power shortages.

Legacy is taking a small-is-beautiful approach rather than replicating the massive data centers being built for Big Tech firms. Those are the size of small towns and consume huge volumes of water and hundreds of megawatts of power, while the capacity of Legacy’s downtown building is about 30 MW, and it expects the Star Tribune site to host around 20 MW of data center equipment.

The scaled-down approach may well be an attractive option for operators in the future.

This article first appeared on Network World.

The 19^th-century French novelist Honore de Balzac is believed to have said that behind every great fortune lies a great crime.

That’s even more true today than it was 200 years ago — just look at how Big AI, including Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and others have built their trillion-dollar fortunes. 

They all use vast amounts of copyrighted material to train their large language models (LLMs) without paying the copyright holders. In other words, they steal it. They don’t call it stealing, though. They call it “fair use,” which in this case amounts to the same thing.

Generative AI (genAI) training requires massive amounts of text. The better-written and more information-dense that text is, the more it helps. AI gets a lot smarter a lot faster when it’s trained on well-written books and magazine and newspaper articles than when it’s trained on social media banter (or most everything else you find on the internet).

Since the dawn of AI, companies have been hoovering up copyrighted material wherever they find it — on the open web, behind paywalls, even in manually scanned books — and then used the scanned text. And they do it all without asking authors’ or publishers’ permissions, and without paying them.

It’s the greatest intellectual property theft in history by a long shot — billions and billions of dollars worth. Books, articles, music, photographs, artwork, you name it. If a human being has created it, Big AI has likely grabbed it and ingested it without asking, then made big profits off it.

I know this from personal experience; I’ve got skin in the game. Big AI companies have used at least 30 of my books to train their models without asking.  And that’s only what I’ve confirmed. Big AI might well have stolen even more. And it also might have stolen many of the thousands of articles I’ve written through the years.

For the AI bigwigs, it’s standard operating procedure. So it was surprising to see Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella calling out Big AI for its hypocrisy in using other people’s intellectual property without paying, then crying foul when small AI companies use Big AI’s work to train their own models using a technique called distillation.

He wrote on X: “While the great innovation that comes from model providers having fair use rights to train models on public data is needed, I find it ironic that the status quo is to then turn around and impose restrictive terms on distillation, and to reserve the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data.” 

One important note here: Nadella believes Big AI should be allowed to steal copyrighted material for training purposes. He makes that clear by his mention of “fair use.” His issue is that he believes smaller AI companies should be able to use Big AI’s work to train their models — and Big AI doesn’t want to let them do it.

Alistar Barr, in Business Insider, makes a related point: “Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don’t like and can’t stop.” 

Before we look at whether Nadella is right in calling Big AI’s actions hypocritical, let’s examine the technique at the heart of the issue: distillation.

The lowdown on distillation

Distillation refers to an AI training technique in which you take outputs from one AI model, such as the answer to a prompt, and use that output to train your own model. AI companies do that quite frequently and have been doing so for a long time.

Barr explains distillation this way: “Distillation looks an awful lot like what AI companies have been doing to the rest of the internet. Scrape web content for free and without permission. Turn it into a product you sell. Argue it’s fair use. Hope the lawyers sort out the details later.”

Elon Musk has admitted his company xAI used distillation techniques to take output from competitor OpenAI to train xAI’s Grok chatbot. He explained, “Generally AI companies distill other AI companies.”

Analysts point out the AI industry is built on distillation. Neil Shah, vice president of research at Counterpoint Research says, “The reality is none of the models is an island and the entire industry has mostly evolved based on recursive learning. The newer entrants are in many instances going through the same routes of ‘distillation’ and ‘optimization.’”

It’s only become an issue now because Chinese AI companies have been using distillation techniques to catch up to American AI companies.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been pressuring the US to take legal action against the Chinese companies.  Anthropic has piled on as well, saying the fight against distillation requires a coordinated response across the AI industry, cloud providers, and policymakers.

Hypocrisy or fair use?

So are OpenAI, Anthropic and other big US AI firms hypocritical, as Nadella claims? Absolutely. They’ve built their businesses on the theft of billions of dollars of stolen intellectual property and call it fair use. Now, they’re playing the victims when competitors do the same to them. (They’re also in some cases paying up; Anthropic just last week settled a copyright suit, paying out $1.5 billion.)

It’s good to see Nadella call out their hypocrisy. But Microsoft is as guilty of intellectual theft as the others — its AI Copilot is powered by OpenAI’s and Anthropic’s chatbots. The company faces major lawsuits for intellectual property theft. Among them is one by the New York Times, New York Daily News, and Center for Investigating Reporting, another by 400 local and regional newspapers, and another by 11 authors, including Pulitzer Prize winners Kai Bird, Jia Tolentino, and Daniel Okrent.

So, don’t praise Nadella for speaking out. Criticize him (and other AI tech leaders) for stealing billions of dollars in intellectual property from countless writers and publishers and calling it fair use.

The White House is monitoring developments after OpenAI revealed earlier this week that one of the company’s AI systems went beyond its intended parameters during a security test and managed to hack into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face. According to Reuters, presidential technology advisor Michael Kratsios has been briefed on the incident.

The OpenAI model escape also prompted a group of Republican and Democratic members of the House of Representatives to introduce two new bills. One, called the AI Kill Switch Act, would give the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) the authority to order companies to shut down AI models deemed to pose a risk to human life or the US economy.

The other measure would require developers of the most advanced AI models to undergo independent security reviews before the systems are put into use.

The European Commission has fined Google a total of €890 million ($1 billion) for its breaches of the Digital Market Act (DMA).

Just over half the fine — €460 million — was because Google illegally gave preference to its own services in Google Search results.

The remainder was because in the Google Play store for Android apps, the company prevented app developers from leading consumers to alternative, often cheaper, purchase channels. Under the DMA, app developers who distribute their apps via Google Play or Apple’s App Store should be able to inform customers of alternative offers.

Now Google must give third-party services featuring in its results the same treatment as its own services, and allow developers of apps in the Play Store to communicate about offers both in and outside the Play Store, or face further fines.

The Commission first raised these issues with Google in March 2025. In April of this year, the Commission laid out plans as to how Google should allow other third-parties to share its searches, suggestions that the tech firm firmly resisted. Earlier this month, the Commission also said  Android should be open to other AI agents and not limited to Google’s own Gemini.

Google is not the only US company to have fallen foul of the DMA. In April 2025, Apple was fined €500 million for breaching the Act and, last month, the Commission fired the first shots at cloud hyperscalers Microsoft and Amazon.

Among a range of factors leading to a wave of tech sector layoffs in 2026 is the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and automation. Companies are reconfiguring their workforces to leverage AI for increased efficiency and reduced operating costs. This realignment and reduction is implemented even by companies reporting strong financial performance.

But it’s not just AI leading to workforce cuts. Complementing this technological shift are ongoing economic uncertainty, inflation, and higher interest rates, compounded by a chip shortage and rising energy costs. This mix is driving companies to cut costs and streamline operations for increased efficiency.

According to data compiled by Layoffs.fyi, an online tracker that keep tabs on job losses in the technology sector, 123,941 tech employees were laid off at 269 companies in 2025. The site also reports that 71,981 government employees were laid off by DOGE alone, with 182,528 total federal workers laid off.

Here is a list — to be updated regularly — of some of the most prominent technology layoffs the industry has experienced recently.

Notable tech layoffs in 2026

• Monday.com
• Microsoft
• Meta
• Cisco
• Cloudflare
• Oracle
• Atlassian
• Salesforce
• Amazon
• Ericsson

July 22, 2026: Monday.com cuts 20% of its workforce to restructure for the AI era

The company says the decision to cut 620 jobs isn’t about margins, but about creating a flatter organization built around AI agents, autonomous teams, and deeper customer engagement.

July 6, 2026: Microsoft cuts 4,800 jobs, primarily in sales and Xbox teams

As the company trims thousands of jobs, it’s also investing in embedded engineering teams and AI infrastructure. The layoffs come several weeks after the company offered 8,750 US employees voluntary retirement buyouts.

June 5, 2026: Tech industry cut 38,242 jobs in May, worst since 2024

AI was blamed for 40% of the job cuts in May, up from 7% in January, according to research by employment placement company Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

May 20, 2026: Meta cuts 8,000 jobs, around 10% of workforce

The cuts are expected to expected to hit Meta’s engineering and product teams the hardest, arriving as Meta pivots toward AI to boost efficiency across its organization, according to Yahoo Tech.

May 13, 2026: Cisco to cut nearly 4,000 jobs despite strong growth in AI, enterprise networking

Despite reporting positive financial news — including record third-quarter revenue of $15.8 billion, a 12% year-over-year increase — Cisco said it will eliminate almost 4,000 jobs.

May 7, 2026: Cloudflare to cut 1,100 jobs in AI-focused restructuring

About 20% of Cloudflare’s global workforce will be culled as the company pivots for the agentic AI era, Reuters reported.

April 1, 2026: Oracle to cut up to 30,000 jobs globally, putting enterprise support and roadmaps at risk

Oracle began laying off employees on March 31 in what could be the largest workforce reduction in the company’s history. Employees received termination emails at 6 a.m. local time with immediate system lockouts and no prior warning. (Note: in June, CNBC put the final layoff tally at 21,000.)

March 12, 2026: Atlassian cuts 1,600 jobs to fund AI and enterprise expansion

Atlassian will reduce its global workforce by approximately 10%, eliminating around 1,600 roles, as the collaboration software maker redirects capital toward artificial intelligence development and enterprise sales.

March 11, 2026: Tech layoffs surpass 45,000 in early 2026

A recent analysis by RationalFX found 45,363 job cuts globally so far this year—with roughly 68% or more than 30,000 occurring in the U.S. — highlighting ongoing workforce cuts even as many tech companies report strong revenue growth.

February 10, 2026: Salesforce lays off staffers as executive leadership churn continues

Salesforce has reduced close to 1,000 roles earlier this month across teams, including marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit, Business Insider reported, quoting employees familiar with the matter.

January 23, 2026: Amazon layoffs expected to disproportionately hit AWS and tech talent

As the market slows down, AWS and other Amazon units are preparing for another round of layoffs, which is expected to overwhelmingly impact tech talent. An email from HR leader Beth Galetti on Jan. 28 confirmed 16,000 job cuts.

January 15, 2026: Ericsson plans to shed 1,600 jobs in Sweden

 Ericsson lans to cut some 1,600 jobs in Sweden, the telecommunications equipment maker said doubling down on recent cost-saving measures that have helped it weather a prolonged downturn in telecoms spending, Reuters reports.

January 13, 2026: Meta plans to cut around 10% of employees in Reality Labs business

Meta plans to cut around 10% of the employees in its Reality Labs division who work on products including the metaverse, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions, according to The New York Times.

Layoffs in 2025

• Cisco
• Oracle
• Windsurf
• Intel
• Microsoft
• Crowdstrike
• HPE
• Autodesk
• HPE
• CISA
• Workday
• Salesforce
• Meta

Global tech-sector layoffs surpass 244,000 in 2025

Economic uncertainty, elevated interest rates, and AI adoption have driven workforce reductions across tech companies worldwide, according to a RationalFX report.

October 28, 2025: Amazon to cut 14,000 jobs across company

Amazon will reduce its overall workforce by 14,000, cutting layers of management across the company and hiring in some areas to support its “biggest bets”.

August 18, 2025: Cisco and Oracle to cut hundreds of Bay Area jobs

Tech companies Cisco and Oracle are cutting hundreds of jobs across the Bay Area. Cisco will eliminate 221 positions at its Milpitas and San Francisco offices, effective Oct. 13. Oracle is reducing 101 positions in Santa Clara on the same date 

August 5, 2025: 3 weeks after acquiring Windsurf, Cognition offers staff the exit door

Cognition, the AI coding startup that acquired rival company Windsurf three weeks ago, laid off 30 employees last week and is offering buyouts to the roughly 200 remaining employees on the team, reports The Information.

July 25, 2025, Intel to lay off 22% of workforce, CEO Tan signals ‘no more blank checks’

Intel will reduce its workforce to 75,000 employees by the end of 2025 as new CEO Lip-Bu Tan implements sweeping changes designed to transform the struggling chipmaker

July 8, 2025, Intel layoffs begin: Chipmaker is cutting many thousands of jobs

Intel has begun laying off employees across the company. CEO Lip-Bu Tan told workers back in April to expect major layoffs at Intel in the coming months as the chipmaker slashes costs and overhauls its organization after years of technical setbacks and falling sales.

July 2, 2025: Microsoft will cut 9,000 workers

Microsoft will lay off about 9,000 employees, a source familiar with the workforce cut told CNBC.  The cuts will reportedly affect less than 4% of Microsoft’s global workforce and will impact different teams, geographies and levels of experience. This is the latest in a string of cuts the tech giant has made this year.

June 17, 2025: Intel looks to factory layoffs to return to profitability

Intel will lay off up to 20% of its manufacturing sector employees starting in July, according to media reports, as the company looks for options as it seeks a return to profitability. The cuts reportedly will be made around the world, but some of the layoffs will be closer to home, according to a report in The Oregonian citing an internal company memo from Intel manufacturing Vice President Naga Chandrasekaran.

May 7, 2025: CrowdStrike to lay off 5% of staff

CrowdStrike announced a plan to cut about 500 roles, roughly 5% of its workforce, to streamline operations and reduce costs. The cybersecurity company will incur about $36 million to $53 million in charges related to the layoffs

March 6, 2025: HPE cuts 2,500 jobs, remains committed to Juniper buy

CEO Antonio Neri told Wall Street analysts that HPE would begin implementing a cost-cutting program involving layoffs of about 2,500 employees over the next 18 months. HPE employs about 61,000 people worldwide.

Feb. 27, 2025: Autodesk to lay off 9% of workforce

Software maker Autodesk is laying off 1,350 staff. With the rise of subscription and multi-year contracts billed annually, and self-service enablement, it finds it needs fewer sales staff, CEO Andrew Anagnost said in a message to employees. And with its cloud, platform, and AI products proving most profitable, it’s concentrating its staff and investments there.

Feb. 27, 2025: HP to lay off 2,000 more

As part of an ongoing restructuring, HP plans to lay off up to another 2,000 workers. In recent weeks, the company has tried — unsuccessfully — to do away with telephone support staff by forcing callers to wait for at least 15 minutes if they refuse to use self-service support resources online. The company swiftly backtracked, but wider job cuts are still on.

Feb. 21, 2025: CISA lays off 130

Government employees get laid off too: In this case, 130 workers at the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency are being shown the door as a result of a DOGE decision. Cybersecurity experts are concerned that the cuts will harm the international collaborations that CISA has fostered, quite apart from their concerns about the security of the DOGE layoff process itself.

Feb. 5, 2025: Workday lays off 1,750

As it moves to invest more in AI and international growth, Workday is laying off 8.5% of its workforce and disposing of unused office space. Some analysts fear the cutbacks will affect the company’s customer service — unless AI can pick up the slack.

Feb. 4, 2025: Salesforce lays off over 1,000

At the same time as it’s hiring sales staff for its new artificial intelligence products, Salesforce is laying off over 1,000 workers across the company, according to Bloomberg. As of June, 2024, the company had over 72,000 employees, according to its website. Salesforce did not comment on the report. In 2024 the company reportedly laid off around 1,000 staff too, in two waves: January and July.

Jan. 14, 2025: Meta will lay off 5% of workforce

Mark Zuckerberg told Meta employees he intended to “move out the low performers faster” in an internal memo reported by Bloomberg. The memo announced that the company will lay off 5% of its staff, or around 3,600 staff, beginning Feb. 10. The company had already reduced its headcount by 5% in 2024 through natural attrition, the memo said. Among those leaving the company will be staff previously responsible for fact checking of posts on its social media platforms in the US, as the company begins relying on its users to police content.

Tech layoffs in 2024

• Equinix
• AMD
• Freshworks
• Cisco
• General Motors
• Intel
• OpenText
• Microsoft
• AWS
• Dell

Nov. 26, 2024: Equinix to cut 3% of staff

Despite intense demand for its data center capacity, Equinix is planning to lay off 3% of its workforce, or around 400 employees. The announcement followed the appointment of Adaire Fox-Martin to replace Charles Meyers as CEO and the departures of two other senior executives, CIO Milind Wagle and CISO Michael Montoya.

Nov. 13, 2024: AMD to cut 4% of workforce

AMD will lay off around 1,000 employees as it pivots towards developing AI-focused chips, it said. The move came as a surprise to staff, as the company also reported strong quarterly earnings.

Nov. 7, 2024: Freshworks lays off 660

Enterprise software vendor Freshworks laid off around 660 staff, or around 13% of its headcount, despite reporting increased revenue and profits in its fourth fiscal quarter. The company described the layoffs as a realignment of its global workforce.

Sept. 17, 2024: Cisco lays off 6,000

After laying off around 4,200 staff in February, Cisco is at it again, laying off another 6,000 or around 7% of its workforce. Among the divisions affected were its threat intelligence unit, Talos Security.

Aug. 20, 2024: General Motors lays off 1,000 software staff

More than 1,000 software and services staff are on the way out at General Motors, signalling that it could be rethinking its digital transformation strategy. In an internal memo, the company said that it was moving resources to its highest-priority work and flattening hierarchies.

August 1, 2024: Intel removes 15,000 roles

Intel plans to cut its workforce by around 15% to reduce costs after a disastrous second quarter. Revenue for the three months to June 29 stagnated at around $12.8 billion, but net income fell 85% to $83 million, prompting CEO Pat Gelsinger to bring forward a company-wide meeting in order to announce that 15,000 staff would lose their jobs. “This is an incredibly hard day for Intel as we are making some of the most consequential changes in our company’s history,” Gelsinger wrote in an email to staff, continuing: “Our revenues have not grown as expected — and we’ve yet to fully benefit from powerful trends, like AI. Our costs are too high, our margins are too low. We need bolder actions to address both — particularly given our financial results and outlook for the second half of 2024, which is tougher than previously expected.”

July 4, 2024: OpenText to lay off 1,200

OpenText said it will lay off 1,200 staff, or about 1.7% of its workforce, in a bid to save around $100 million annually. It plans to hire new sales and engineering staff in other areas in 2025, it said.

June 4, 2024: Microsoft lays off staff in Azure division

Microsoft laid off staff in several teams supporting its cloud services, including Azure for Operations and Mission Engineering. The company didn’t say exactly how many staff were leaving.

April 4, 2024: Amazon downsizes AWS in a fresh cost-cutting round

Amazon announced hundreds of layoffs in the sales and marketing teams of its AWS cloud services division — and also in the technology development teams for its physical retail stores, as it stepped back from efforts to generalize the “Just Walk Out” technology built for its Amazon Fresh grocery stores.

April 1, 2024: Dell acknowledges 13,000 job cuts

Dell Technologies’ latest 10K filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission disclosed that the company had laid off 13,000 employees over the course of the 2023 fiscal year; it characterized the layoffs and other reorganizational moves as cost-cutting measures. “These actions resulted in a reduction in our overall headcount,” the company said. A comparison to the previous year’s 10K filing, performed by The Register, found that Dell employed 133,000 people at that point, compared to 120,000 as of February 2024. Dell announced layoffs of 6,650 staffers on Feb. 6, but it is unclear whether those cuts were reflected in the numbers from this year’s 10K statement.

See news of earlier layoffs.

A US federal court has approved Anthropic’s $1.5 billion settlement in a class-action lawsuit in which authors accused the AI company of using their books without permission to train the AI model Claude. This is the largest such settlement to date in a US copyright case, according to Reuters.

The dispute is one of several legal cases in which copyright holders sued AI companies over how large language models (LLMs) were trained, and it is the first major AI-related copyright dispute in the US to be resolved through a settlement.

A judge had previously ruled that the actual training of AI models using books falls under the “fair use” doctrine in US copyright law. But Anthropic was found to have violated the law by storing more than 7 million pirated books in a central library, regardless of whether they were later used for AI training or not.

Jobs involving physical labor are at high risk of disruption from automation, with new technologies such as AI robots becoming more prevalent, according to a recent study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). That means workers in construction and extraction, farming, fishing, forestry, production and material transportation could be affected by fast-moving technology changes.

“Routine and low-skilled jobs are at higher risk,” the Paris-based public policy group said, adding that “overall, jobs requiring non-routine cognitive, social and creative skills are less susceptible to automation.”

The kinds of creative and cognitive jobs still thought to be less exposed to automation include social work and community service roles. 

OECD also said management jobs — which often require workers to devise creative answers to solve problems — fall within the creative and cognitive category. “While AI has made some high-skill job requirements more susceptible to automation, many critical skills in these roles remain difficult to automate,” OECD said.

The same still holds true for some physical and manual labor jobs – including cleaners, agricultural workers, food-prep assistants, and laborers — which are less exposed to the affects of AI, OECD said.  

But people who work in programming, translating and interpretation positions could find their work affected by the quick rise of AI tools and services. According to the organization, global AI uptake rose from 7% in 2021 to 20% in 2025.

“In these occupations, GenAI could perform a significant share of tasks at least twice as fast today or in the near future,” OECD said.

The effects of the AI boom are not always uniform across industries or regions. In a separate 2026 Employment Outlook study released by the group, exposure to disruption from generative AI (genAI) ranges from about 16% in some areas to more than 70% elsewhere, depending on industries and occupations. 

Numerous research firms have said in recent years that AI is driving short-term job losses, though tech industry experts and analysts have argued AI will also create new careers and jobs as agentic AI takes over low-skilled work. 

AI technology has become so ubiquitous that it’s been compared to electricity — virtually all companies will need it or at least know how to use it. But it’s adoption has been hindered at times as companies struggle to find ROI from its use, and by regulatory and ethical hurdles.

In the US, AI blamed for June job losses

According to a Challenger, Gray & Christmas study released earlier this month, AI was cited as the top reason for job cuts in June. The outplacement firm said employers cut 45,849 job cuts in June, of which 14,029 were attributed to AI, with the tech industry leading the cuts.

“Tech remains the epicenter of this year’s cuts,” Challenger said. “AI is the dominant force as companies are restructuring around it, automating roles, and reallocating budgets toward new capabilities. The sector is being reshaped in real time.”

Overall, AI has been responsible for 173,568 job cuts since 2021, the company said.

AI is hurting jobs in customer service, internal reporting, telecommunications, and hosting automation, said Victor Janulaitis, a staffing consultant who was formerly CEO at Janco Associates Inc.

“C-level executives continue to be focused on eliminating ‘non-essential’ managers, staff, and services,” he said. “Coders and developers have limited opportunities with legacy applications.”

While jobs in the IT sector overall are declining, current hiring tends to skew in the direction of people with AI skills. A report this month by CompTIA put job listings with AI skills at around 500,000, which is close to double the number in January.

“Employers in other industries are accelerating digital transformation initiatives and moving from AI experimentation to implementation,” said Seth Robinson, CompTIA’s vice president for industry research.

That view dovetails with what ManpowerGroup, the recruitment firm, is seeing; demand for AI-related skills has nearly doubled over the past year, said Ger Doyle, regional president of North America at ManpowerGroup.

That growth extends well beyond traditional technology roles as companies move from experimenting to AI deployments at scale, Doyle said. “We’re seeing it influence hiring across occupations ranging from data science and engineering to project management and operational roles,” he said.

Providers and deployers of AI systems: You only have a couple of weeks left until you must explicitly inform users when they are interacting with AI content.

To assist in the effort, the European Commission (Commission) has published guidelines to help AI deployers get in line with the AI Act’s transparency obligations, which will begin to go into effect on August 2.

After that, companies providing AI systems must alert users when they are interacting with AI. They must also tell users when they have been exposed to deepfakes, “emotion recognition,” or biometric categorization systems, or when they are given AI-manipulated content in matters of “public interests without human review or editorial control.”

Henna Virkkunen, the Commission’s executive VP for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said in a statement, “with today’s guidelines, the Commission supports the smooth and effective application of the AI Act to make AI systems interacting with people such as chatbots and AI agents and AI content more transparent and trustworthy. These guidelines support providers and deployers in meeting their obligations under the AI Act, while helping citizens know when they are interacting with AI.”

Systems must include machine-readable markers to reveal such content, to reduce “the risk of deception and manipulation” and build public trust in AI.

“Generative systems have collapsed the cost of producing convincing content while the cost of judging it stands where it always stood,” said Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research. This requirement is “an attempt to restore friction to that imbalance.”

A company’s non-compliance could result in fines anywhere from €750K (about $856K) to €15M (about $17 million), or even up to 3% of its total worldwide annual revenue.

Transparency requirements

The EU AI Act’s transparency requirements apply to “natural or legal persons,” public authorities, agencies, or other bodies that develop AI systems, or have them developed, and place them on the EU market or into use under their name or trademark. This means all companies, regardless of whether or not they are EU-based.

“Systems placed on the European market, put into service there, or producing outputs used there are inside the field, wherever the developer sits,” Gogia noted.

Applicable systems must be intended to interact directly with “natural persons”; these systems include AI-enabled chatbots or conversational agents, AI companions, or coding agents. However, AI-enabled tools like recommender systems, spam filters, authentication, search and retrieval, transcription, text and code auto-completion, or predictive maintenance do not fall under the rule.

Specific outputs such as AI-generated text, images, video, and audio must contain a machine-readable mark. Deepfakes and public interest-related text created by AI without human review or control must be clearly labeled, however, deepfake content that is “artistic, creative, satirical, or fictional” is largely exempt.

AI content must be marked with one of three labels: “AI,” “Fully AI-generated,” or “Partially AI-modified.” For instance, “Fully AI-generated” applies when news summaries, music, art, or videos have been created without any human oversight (apart from prompting), while “partially AI-modified” could mean a person’s face is swapped into an authentic photograph to create a deepfake.

The three icons are publicly available for free use; enterprises can download zip files in PNG and SVG formats.

Most of the Act’s transparency rules begin to go into effect on August 2. But AI systems placed on the market before then will have some leeway; they must be in compliance by December 2.

However, a four-month allowance “on one obligation, for one population of systems, contingent on one procedural step, is not a strategy,” Gogia emphasized. Enterprises should plan to comply by August 2 and “treat any relief that arrives as margin.”

A consistent code of practice

Along with the transparency guidelines, the Commission has introduced a code of practice that essentially serves as a gesture of good faith. When signed, it can provide “legal certainty” and a “simple and practical” way to demonstrate compliance with the AI Act, according to the Commission. Signatories can also collaborate through the ‘Signatory Taskforce,’ which will share practices and advance technologies around marking and labeling practices.

Providers that choose not to sign must comply through other methods and demonstrate that those methods are “adequate” through assessment by surveillance authorities, according to the Commission.

Non-signatories “keep their flexibility, and will face more case-by-case scrutiny for it,” said Gogia.

Criteria for compliance

Shashi Bellamkonda, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group, pointed out that the transparency requirements apply to content only when three criteria are met: It has been published, is informative to the public, or is on matters of public interest.

B2B business content or blogs may not need an AI disclosure if they do not meet these criteria, he noted. Also, published text that has undergone human review or is under editorial control does not need to be labeled. Editorial control means that a person must hold the ultimate legal responsibility for the publication of the content.

Many companies like Google, Adobe, and LinkedIn have already established ways to identify images marked as AI-generated. Meta has made it a requirement, but the creator has to add the AI-generated label, Bellamkonda said.

“This is a good move for guardrails around public information, and companies with good compliance and ethical oversight may not have to worry about this,” he noted. But as a general practice, companies should disclose AI-generated content and state whether it has been human reviewed.

Creating a transparency pipeline

Establishing full transparency means identifying who carries the responsibility for the content, whether the marking survives real use, not just testing, and what evidence will defend the decision, Gogia said.

Concerns cluster around responsibility, durability and evidence. Several organizations usually touch one piece of content, and none controls the whole chain, which is why contracts become the “pressure point,” he said. Most current agreements were written to deliver software and say “almost nothing” about provenance persistence, verification access, or evidence retention.

The durability concern is the most difficult, Gogia noted, because marking performs well in controlled settings but “badly in ordinary life.” Meta, for one, said its invisible watermark was designed to survive cropping; a published test, however, found the company’s preview detector missed 55% of cropped images.

“CIOs should ask which platform can actually provide evidence before believing its dashboard,” said Gogia.

Disclosure of AI use must be “clear, distinguishable and accessible,” he emphasized. “A notice buried in lengthy terms, or reachable only through determined clicking, satisfies nobody, least of all a market surveillance authority.”

Sustained compliance is a “living control” requiring a central record of systems, duties and evidence; testing taking place where the user meets the control rather than where the developer built it; and continuous supplier assurance. Enforcement will vary by country, so keep one common baseline with local overlays, Gogia said.

His advice: Inventory every system that talks to people, generates content, or gauges sentiment; classify provider and deployer roles; place disclosures at first interaction; define substantive human review; keep the evidence.

Marks and provenance signals should be tested after content undergoes cropping, compression, translation, transcription, and other editing, Gogia said. A useful audit starts from a real output and follows its “pulse” through generation, editing and publication, identifying at “each beat” the responsible party, the surviving mark, and evidence for exceptions. Missed labels should also be traced for root cause and recurrence.

To ensure compliance, before August 2, enterprises need a prioritized inventory, live disclosures on the highest-risk use cases, and a “named owner for every control,” he noted. In the first 30 days, they should stabilize and test; in the first 90 days, push requirements into procurement processes as a standing discipline. Procurement must secure commitments on marking methods, known failure modes, and evidence access, with explicit notice if/when any of them change.

“The sensible architecture is a common transparency baseline carrying traceability, responsibility, and evidence, with jurisdictional overlays for language, sector rules, and local practice,” Gogia said.

This article originally appeared on CIO.com.

Dozens of former Apple employees now working at OpenAI have been put on notice after Apple reportedly sent legal letters ordering them to preserve documents and communications relevant to its trade secrets lawsuit against OpenAI. 

The Financial Times reports that “around 40” employees have been targeted with these letters, which repeat Apple’s claim that its confidential information might have been exfiltrated, alleging “trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract.”  The letters also require them to arrange to meet with Apple’s lawyers.

The underlying lawsuit

This comes on the heels of Apple’s explosive lawsuit against OpenAI in which Apple accused the AI company (and former Apple Vice President Tang Tan) of extensive coordinated data theft. Tan was at Apple for 24 years and is now Chief Hardware Officer at OpenAI. 

Apple’s lawsuit is defined by claims OpenAI took a range of steps to pry confidential Apple data from existing Apple employees, including using information such as internal project code names, to gain even more knowledge during interviews. The company says the evidence it has presented so far is only the “tip of the iceberg” concerning OpenAI’s approach.

The lawsuit requests that OpenAI be prevented from using any Apple information during the development of its hardware. Apple is also seeking damages and suing two former employees for breach of contract for violating their employment agreements.

The letters are significant. They represent formal directives that require former Apple staff to preserve documents, messages, emails, and other communications that could be relevant to the case. The demand reflects Apple’s belief that the alleged misuse of confidential information could be more widespread across the competing company. What’s critical is that orders of this kind override any standard data destruction policy and deletion of the requested information becomes a legal offense. 

Why this matters beyond the protagonists

In making its move, Apple shows this is not a dispute about just one or two hires, but an attempt to constrain the movement of intellectual property between the two firms. With AI hardware emerging as the next major battleground in tech, the case could become a defining one; whatever resolution is eventually reached could define the extent to which former employees can carry experience and knowledge between competing firms. The case might also define what the line is between experience and knowledge and the sharing of trade secrets.

This is important, because modern hardware development relies on far more than just finished designs. Product design leans into supplier relationships, manufacturing assumptions, physics, extensive prototyping, and product-roadmap priorities. If courts treat those accumulated insights as protectable secrets, hiring between major technology companies could become far more legally sensitive.

The Jony Ive question

The case comes as Apple prepares to combat OpenAI in hardware. Its competitor is now working with legendary former Apple designer Jony Ive. Ive is not named in the litigation, but Apple will be keen to find out whether confidential product knowledge, design processes, or supply-chain insights have travelled with former staff into OpenAI’s device work.

Ultimately, for Apple, it’s about protecting its many blueprints for whatever hardware the company expects will come after the iPhone.

For its part, OpenAI has refuted Apple’s lawsuit, arguing that it is “not aware of any evidence” that the lawsuit has merit. “We have no interest in other companies’ trade secrets,” said OpenAI spokesperson Drew Pusateri. “We remain focused on building innovative technology that empowers people everywhere.” The company’s lawyers also claim it did respond to Apple’s initial inquiries on the matter.

What’s at stake

The significance of Apple’s newly-shared communication preservation orders is that if discovery uncovers evidence supporting Apple’s claims, the case could complicate OpenAI’s hardware plans and create unwelcome scrutiny ahead of any future public offering.

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China has created an international organization to set standards and introduce regulation for AI, inviting 28 other countries to join — but the US, a leading AI powerhouse is not part it.

The World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO) was established by 29 countries, including China, Russia and Brazil, at a ceremony in Shanghai, China, on July 16. Notably absent are the US, the European Union and its member states, the UK, Japan and South Korea.

Chinese AI companies have made a concerted effort to provide an alternative to US dominance. While the US is clearly ahead, Chinese enterprises are looking to narrow the gap in various areas: the open-weight model market, AI cyber protection and open source AI.

WAICO has been some years in development and has been designed to set some universal guidelines in AI. Researchers say WAICO differs in three ways from other initiatives to create global AI organizations: membership open to any sovereign state, there is no regime-type test for entry, and its agenda is built around development and the global capability divide.

The signing ceremony to create WAICO comes just days after Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google DeepMind, called on the US to take a lead in global AI regulation. “The US is well-positioned to take the first step in developing such a framework. It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organization, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives,” Hassabis wrote.

Apple’s recently announced $30 billion multi-year agreement with Broadcom is significant because it means billions of chips for Apple devices will be made in the US, supporting hundreds of jobs. 

This is Apple’s biggest US procurement deal so far, but it won’t be the last; when it announced the arrangement, Apple confirmed it is, “working with the administration and businesses across the US to help create an end-to-end silicon supply chain in America.”

That statement implies that the 15 billion chips Broadcom will produce won’t be the only processors in Apple devices to carry tiny little “Made in the USA” slogans. Broadcom is making custom silicon components and wireless connectivity technologies such as RF/wireless chips (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular, FBAR filters) and ASIC work, rather than application processors. But they are still chips for Apple devices.

TSMC doubles down

That’s why it is significant that TSMC confirmed plans to extend its own manufacturing in America. It already has a $165 billion US commitment; now, it is investing an additional $100 billion in four more chip plants — including one dedicated to churning out the company’s most advanced 2nm (and smaller) processors. 

“We believe this investment will help to further foster the development of the US semiconductor ecosystem, strengthen the supply chain, and support an increasing number of high-tech, high-paying jobs in the United States,”  CEO C.C. Wei told analysts.

TSMC has also confirmed plans to invest in packaging facilities for processors, which is basically the process where memory, processor, and networking nodes can all be combined and packaged on the chip. That sort of packaging is needed to make the final SoC chip. That means TSMC factories in the US will be able to churn out the advanced processors used in Apple’s current and, presumably, future devices.

The bill so far

That’s three investments — in processor manufacturing, packaging, and Broadcom radios and chips — all of which are strategically important to Apple devices. TSMC makes the brains, Broadcom brings the connectivity. Total value so far: $295 billion, around 1.5 times Apple’s annual revenue in the Americas.

It isn’t all about Apple. TSMC has other clients, and Apple is no longer the company’s biggest customer thanks to the drive to AI. But it is still an important one. That means at least some of TSMC’s newly invested US manufacturing capacity will be dedicated to making chips for Apple. The open question is how much US-manufactured chips will cost in contrast to those made elsewhere.

It’s bigger than two deals

These aren’t the only chip-focused partnerships Apple has made domestically. Apple’s American Manufacturing Program (AMP) launched in August 2025 as part of a $600 billion four-year US investment commitment. TSMC and Broadcom were both named AMP partners, but they weren’t alone, and some arrangements have already been announced:

• GlobalFoundries is bringing mixed-signal chip manufacturing to make advanced ICs for Face ID.
• Texas Instruments expanded production for analog/power chips.
• Samsung is making a new chip-making process at its Austin, TX fab, described by Apple as having “never been used before anywhere in the world.”
• Apple became the “first and largest customer” of Amkor’s new advanced packaging/test facility in Arizona.
• Corning is expanding glass production.
• Applied Materials is making chip manufacturing equipment under AMP.

Bundle all these deals together and it’s crystal clear that Apple’s $600 billion investment is at least in part focused on the technologically advanced components on which its devices are built. These components also have the advantage in being incredibly small, which means they are easy and cheap to ship for final assembly at increasingly automated final production locations worldwide. 

So, is it coming home?

That’s the strategy: keep the high-value, hard-to-automate work — and the jobs it requires — in America, while leaving final assembly flexible enough to go wherever that makes sense now or in the future. Is Apple bringing manufacturing home? Partially, in that the bits that matter the most — brains and networking— are coming back, even if assembly is not.

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