Companies that blame AI for layoffs trail the Nasdaq by almost 10 percent, FT finds

Companies that blame AI for layoffs are paying a price in the stock market. Firms that cited AI as a factor in job cuts underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10 percent in the 30 trading days after their announcements, according to a Financial Times analysis cited Saturday by TechCrunch, whose running list of major tech employers naming AI in 2026 layoffs reached 21 companies this week.

Two new names in one week

TechCrunch describes its tracker as a reverse-chronological list of bigger tech companies that announced significant layoffs this year with AI as a stated factor, which means the true universe of AI-linked cuts is almost certainly larger; smaller employers rarely put the attribution in writing.

The newest additions arrived on Wednesday. Tel Aviv-based Monday.com disclosed in a Form 6-K filed with the SEC that it will cut about 20 percent of its workforce, roughly 620 positions, with Israeli press reports putting about 350 of the cuts in Israel. The company expects $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges, per the filing, while still projecting 20 percent revenue growth for 2026.

Uber joined the list the same day, cutting 10 percent of its community operations organization, Bloomberg reported, making it the first gig-economy giant to tie a layoff to AI. In an internal memo cited by Bloomberg, Uber's vice president of global community operations wrote that "we cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes," describing an organization that had become too complex and siloed. It was Uber's second round of reductions in less than two months, per Bloomberg, and the company is also recalling remote customer service employees to hub offices.

The investor discount on the AI excuse

The market finding is the FT's alone; no other outlet has published a comparable screen, and underperformance over 30 trading days does not establish causation. As TechCrunch describes it, the FT measured each company's share performance against the Nasdaq in the 30 trading days following its announcement, and the AI-citing group lagged the index by almost 10 percent. That is a meaningful discount for companies that framed their announcements as efficiency stories.

One reading is that investors treat an AI explanation as a proxy for softening demand or earlier over-hiring rather than as evidence of efficiency gains. Another is that they simply doubt the explanation. Either way, the pattern gives boards a concrete reason to think twice before putting the letters AI in a layoff notice.

Executives are already hedging the framing

Monday.com co-founder Eran Zinman said the move "was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," per TechCrunch, language that attempts to claim AI transformation without claiming AI displacement. The company presented the cuts as part of an ongoing transformation of its product, marketing and go-to-market strategy, and says it will keep hiring in strategic areas through 2026.

Attribution language carries risk beyond the trading window, too. AI-linked job cuts have already drawn litigation, most prominently the case covered in our report on the Meta layoffs lawsuit. Between market discounts and courtroom discovery, the incentive to describe cuts in vaguer terms is growing, which will make honest measurement of AI displacement harder, not easier.

The macro backdrop, briefly

The sector-wide arithmetic, nearly 140,000 US tech job cuts since January set against roughly $725 billion in hyperscaler AI capital spending, is laid out in our companion report on the FT analysis. The question this piece raises is narrower: whether naming AI helps or hurts the companies doing the cutting. On the FT's numbers, the market has already voted.