The layoffs don't pay off, but they keep coming; India's call centers hire 17 in nine months; Anthropic funds research into smoothing its own labor disruption; "AI-first world" is code for a layoff

The layoffs don't pay off, but they keep coming; India's call centers hire 17 in nine months; Anthropic funds research into smoothing its own labor disruption; "AI-first world" is code for a layoff

Start with a question that workers ask and executives avoid. If a company replaces people with AI, does the company actually make more money? A new analysis this week says the answer is often no. Gartner studied 350 firms and found that the companies cutting the most jobs showed no improvement in their financial returns [https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318466/20260616/tech-layoffs-hit-1115-day-2026-companies-cite-ai-cuts-fail-boost-returns.htm]. The cuts looked decisive. The payoff did not arrive. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] Nevertheless, the cutting keeps going. Tech layoffs are running at about 1,115 a day in 2026, and more than half of those events name AI as a reason. The damage falls hardest on the youngest workers. The junior share of tech hiring has dropped from about 15% of jobs to 7% since 2023. Recent computer science graduates now face an unemployment rate near 6.1%. The first rung of the career ladder is the rung companies are sawing off. So who catches these workers when they fall? One of the companies building the tools just put money toward answering that question. Anthropic announced a $200 million Economic Futures Research Fund [https://www.anthropic.com/economic-futures/program] on June 10, paired with a $150 million fellowship program for early-career workers. The combined pledge reaches $350 million. Its CEO, Dario Amodei, went further in a personal essay. He argued that government should promise economic support to people displaced by AI. He floated universal basic income funded by taxes on AI companies or higher capital-gains rates [https://www.usnews.com/news/business/articles/2026-06-10/anthropic-pledges-200-million-to-research-ais-economic-impact-as-ceo-suggests-job-loss-solutions]. However, the clearest picture of the disruption comes from India. The country’s business-process-outsourcing (BPO) industry, the call centers and back offices that the world hires to handle routine work, added only 17 net employees in the first nine months of fiscal 2026 [https://cornfordandcross.com/market-insights/customer-service-bpo-the-operational-scale-displacement/]. Not 17,000. Seventeen. For an industry that once absorbed hundreds of thousands of young graduates a year, that number marks a near-total stop. The entry door into India’s service economy is closing, and AI is holding it shut. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Now the countervailing evidence, because this story runs in more than one direction. A survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs found that 67% expect AI to increase their entry-level hiring this year [https://www.aol.com/news/ai-triggering-quiet-hiring-comeback-051521811.html], and 58% plan to add senior leaders too. These executives describe AI as reshaping work rather than erasing it. Treat this as a feeling, not a result. The survey was taken late last year, and intentions and outcomes often part ways. Still, it signals that some leaders plan to hire more. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. The cuts that did land this week fit the familiar pattern. The crypto-data firm Dune eliminated a quarter of its staff on June 15 [https://intellizence.com/insights/layoff-downsizing/major-companies-that-announced-mass-layoffs/]. The marketing company Gambling.com is cutting a quarter of its workforce, and its incoming chief executive framed the move as building for an “AI-first world.” The phrase has become the standard caption for a layoff. So, the job cuts often fail to pay off, yet they continue. The young get hit first. One AI maker is funding the search for answers while asking the public to help foot the bill. The honest reading is that nobody, not the CEOs cutting jobs and not the ones promising to hire, knows yet where this AI makeover is heading. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Wanting a human no longer protects customer service jobs; AI pays directors 62% more; India sheds 3,400 engineers off the books, senior roles down two in three; 1,115 fired daily, the AI-fluent stay

PwC released its 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer [https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/news-room/press-releases/2026/pwc-2026-ai-jobs-barometer.html] this morning, after studying more than one billion job ads across 27 countries. The finding is that the labor market is splitting into two tracks. One track holds what PwC calls “professionalised” roles, where AI handles the routine work and people get paid for judgment, creativity, and leadership. The other holds “democratised” roles, where AI makes the job simple enough that almost anyone can step in. The first track is growing faster in both hiring and pay. The second is falling behind. PwC found that the wage premium for AI skills climbed to 62%, up from 57% a year ago. In consumer-facing industries it now tops 100%. Stated plainly, a worker who can direct AI earns far more than a worker who competes against it. (A “wage premium” is the extra pay one group earns over another for the same kind of work.) Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] Companies that use AI well are hiring more people, not fewer. But the same report shows entry-level jobs dividing along the same line. AI-exposed entry roles now demand skills that used to belong to senior staff. Those roles grew 35% since 2019. Ordinary entry-level roles fell 10%. Newly-minted college grads are experiencing the reduction in entry-level jobs the hard way. Meanwhile, SHRM published its 2026 job-displacement report [https://www.shrm.org/mena/topics-tools/research/automation-generative-ai-and-job-displacement-risk-in-u-s--employment/2026-full-report] on June 12, and its surprising finding is that the share of American jobs at high risk of automation dropped from 6% to 5.1%. That is roughly 7.9 million jobs that look safer than they did a year ago. Task automation rose over the same stretch, yet the displacement risk fell. SHRM found that the “client preferences” barrier is weakening. That barrier is the simple fact that many customers want a human, not a machine. For years the preference protected call-center staff, receptionists, and support agents. The report points to Klarna, the company that replaced about 700 service workers with AI, then rehired humans after customers complained. SHRM’s data suggests customer tolerance for AI is now rising fast. PwC says AI rewards the workers who command it. SHRM says the customer resistance that once protected everyone else is thinning. Both point the same way. Protection is moving away from the job and toward the skill the worker brings to it. We see a similar trend in India. Active tech job openings there fell to a 28-month low of about 93,000 in early June, down from 119,000 in March [https://news.outsourceaccelerator.com/india-it-hiring-falls/]. Senior-level openings dropped 67% from a year earlier. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Analysts now describe Indian tech hiring as “hyper-elastic,” meaning firms expand and shrink their workforces faster and harder than before. A worker who once counted on steady demand now faces a market that swings with every quarter. Indian tech powerhouses TCS, Infosys, Wipro, HCLTech, and Tech Mahindra released an estimated 3,400 mid-tier engineers [https://www.ownyourcareer.in/blog/tech-layoffs-june-2026-india-impact-companies-still-hiring] in May and June, through performance-improvement exits and bench reductions. None of it showed up in formal layoff filings. Salesforce sent cuts into its India delivery teams under its “AI-first” reorganization. Intel ran a second round through its Bengaluru and Hyderabad offices. The shape matters more than the size. Mid-level engineers on non-AI teams are leaving. AI-fluent engineers are staying. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. Trackers of firings in America now count roughly 184,000 tech layoffs in 2026, about 1,115 a day across 247 events [https://skillsyncer.com/layoffs-tracker]. New names this week include Amdocs, which cut 2,900 jobs, many of them in Israel. Salesforce trimmed its Agentforce and Marketing Cloud teams. Google kept paring its Cloud division [https://news.crunchbase.com/startups/tech-layoffs/]. These cuts pile onto a known trend rather than break a new one. They confirm what the bigger reports describe. The question is no longer whether AI takes jobs. The question is which workers it pays and which it passes over. PwC measured the reward. SHRM measured the fading protection. India shows the sorting between AI-savvy and non-AI oriented workers in real time. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The salaries of workers learning to direct these tools are pulling ahead. The workers waiting for the old protections to hold are running short on time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The AI/Labor Report — Friday, 12 June 2026

Customer service is the largest single employment category in the American economy. It is also the one AI is targeting most directly, most publicly, and soonest. Forrester’s 2026 CX Outsourcing Report [https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/ai-will-eliminate-nearly-half-of-all-customer-service-jobs-by-2030/] projects that 49% of current customer service jobs will be gone by 2030. High-volume consumer contact centers face 80% AI containment within five years. Lower-volume B2B environments face roughly 70% containment because their cases require more judgment and less repetition. If AI handles eight or nine out of every ten contacts, the workforce required to handle the remainder looks very different from what exists today. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] Verizon illustrates how that process unfolds on the ground. Before CEO Dan Schulman announced the largest round of layoffs in Verizon’s history [https://www.thestreet.com/employment/verizon-ceo-cuts-to-the-chase-new-layoffs-ai-future], the company required customer service staff to participate in mandatory AI role-playing exercises. Sales representatives spent weeks interacting with an AI system the company described as a tool for improving customer service skills. A former employee reported that the sessions began six weeks before Schulman announced 13,000 job cuts [https://www.wirefly.com/news/report-verizon-employees-may-have-trained-ai-thats-replacing-them] and grew more intensive as the layoff date approached. Verizon said the training was not designed to gather replacement data. The timing made that statement difficult to accept at face value. The company has since confirmed a second round of cuts [https://memeburn.com/verizon-ai-will-replace-much-of-customer-service-in-2026/] scheduled for August 7 at its New Jersey headquarters, with no retraining programs announced for affected workers. Gartner has identified the pattern [https://www.metaintro.com/blog/ai-not-replacing-jobs-2026-data-gartner] clearly enough to project its next phase. A survey of 321 customer service leaders found that only 20% of companies actually reduced staffing because of AI, with most 2025 layoffs tied to federal policy changes and post-pandemic right-sizing instead. Gartner projects that half the companies that did cut workers for AI will rehire them by 2027, but under new job titles. The returning workers will manage and coach the AI systems that replaced their former colleagues. The job is the same conversation, at one remove, with a fraction of the original headcount. Gartner also projects [https://www.retellai.com/blog/will-ai-replace-call-center-agents] that conversational AI will reduce contact center labor costs by $80 billion in 2026, even though only one in ten agent interactions will actually be automated this year. The savings come not primarily from firing staff but from AI absorbing repetitive, high-volume contacts that currently drive 30 to 45% annual staff turnover across the industry. Companies do not need to announce layoffs to shrink. They simply stop replacing people who leave. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. The workers best positioned to survive this shift are those who have built genuine fluency with AI tools. Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index [https://smart-team.io/en/work-trend-index-2026-microsoft/], surveying 20,000 knowledge workers across 10 countries, found that only 19% of AI users operate in what Microsoft calls the Frontier Zone, where individual capability and organizational support reinforce each other. Ten percent are in a state of blocked agency: workers with genuine AI skills trapped inside organizations that have not updated their processes or incentives to put those skills to use. Only 13% say their organization explicitly rewards reinventing work with AI. Meanwhile, Google announced Thursday a $50 million commitment [https://www.axios.com/2026/06/11/google-trade-worker-initiative-ai] to train more than 300,000 skilled trade workers across the U.S., directing funds through 14 labor unions and four trade associations. The investment targets the electricians, fiber technicians, welders, and HVAC specialists needed to build and maintain AI data centers. Meta announced a $115 million training program for skilled trade workers earlier this week. Anthropic committed $150 million to a national fellowship program. An estimated 2.1 million skilled trades jobs could go unfilled nationally by 2030. The Trump administration’s immigration policies have accelerated the shortage, with construction jobs bearing the heaviest impact of any sector. The companies building the infrastructure that replaces service workers cannot find enough people to build the buildings that house it. BUY NOW [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/invasion_ai?_gl=1*g1iey2*_ga*OTc1NjU2NTcyLjE3NzQwMzA3NjM.*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzQwMzMyMjUkbzIkZzEkdDE3NzQwMzQ2ODgkajYwJGwwJGgw]! Get the book that examines how the AI invasion already happened. You just weren’t invited. $9.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required. 2-hr reading time. The most authoritative counterargument to the Forrester projections comes from the OECD’s June 2026 Economic Outlook [https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/oecd-economic-outlook-scarring-effects-recession-ai-labour-displacement/], titled “Under Pressure.” The report found no signs of widespread labor displacement from AI at the industry level. Job vacancies in AI-exposed sectors grew faster than in other sectors. The primary constraint, the OECD argues, is a shortage of workers who can use AI rather than a surplus of workers it has replaced. Unemployment among workers aged 20 to 30 in AI-exposed roles, though, rose approximately 3 percentage points in 2025. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The aggregate numbers look stable because experienced workers are absorbing more output per person. The entry door for young workers trying to build careers in AI-exposed fields is closing. The OECD finds no widespread displacement. What it finds instead is a generation trying to get their first foothold in a labor market that is quietly pulling the ladder up. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Amazon's new robot speaks and responds to orders; India's entry jobs collapsed 44% yoy; Japan embraces robots as it depopulates; South Africa hits 45% youth unemployment Artificial Immigrants arrive

On June 4, Amazon gathered journalists at a fulfillment center near London to introduce the next generation of its Proteus warehouse robot [https://www.techtimes.com/articles/318088/20260609/amazon-unveils-conversational-proteus-warehouse-robot-10b-europe-push.htm]. The new model can roam freely across an entire facility and take instructions in plain conversational language. Workers tell it what it needs to do. It figures out the route, the timing, and the priority on its own. Amazon also announced a plan to invest more than €10 billion modernizing its European fulfillment network and add 25,000 jobs across the continent. At roughly the same time, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy sent a memo to staff [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/05/amazon-robot-proteus-warehouse-ai-layoffs.html] acknowledging that AI will reduce the company’s total corporate workforce over the coming years. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today,” he wrote. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] Amazon has eliminated tens of thousands of corporate positions since late 2025. The London event was a showcase for the physical side of that same process. Robots that understand plain language do not need specialized software operators. The work of directing them moves from a trained technician to anyone on the floor, and then, eventually, to no one in particular. The workforce consequences of this pattern are already visible in India, where Amazon cut 12,000 jobs in April as it redirected spending toward AI infrastructure. India’s technology job market hit a 28-month low in June [https://analyticsindiamag.com/ai-news/india-tech-hiring-hits-28-month-low-as-active-job-demand-falls-17-yoy/], with only 93,000 active openings recorded, down 14% from May and 17% from a year earlier. IT services, the sector that built India’s modern middle class, saw openings fall 31% year over year. Entry-level positions for workers with up to two years of experience dropped to 10,000 openings [https://www.outlookbusiness.com/corporate/india-incs-fresher-hiring-sees-steep-drop-amid-ai-adoption], a 44% annual decline. EY India’s technology sector leader summed up the shift plainly: revenue growth is now decoupled from headcount growth. Indian IT firms are expanding output without expanding staff. The same dynamic runs through Southeast Asia, where it lands on workers with far fewer protections. A McKinsey survey [https://www.upi.com/Top_News/World-News/2026/05/25/gig-economy-worker/5161779758231/] found that about two-thirds of major Southeast Asian companies have already fully adopted AI or are actively expanding its deployment. At the Semicon Southeast Asia 2026 conference in Kuala Lumpur, industry leaders described the automation trend as permanent. “There is no going back,” one speaker said. An estimated 40 million gig workers across the region face direct exposure to these shifts. A World Bank report urged governments to expand AI job training and strengthen support for displaced workers, while noting that many countries in the region still lack basic AI skills education in their school systems. Japan faces the same technology at the opposite end of the demographic spectrum. Japan has an estimated 1.3 million unfilled technology positions and a labor shortage [https://siliconcanals.com/sc-w-japan-is-deploying-robots-not-to-replace-workers-but-because-theres-no-one-left-to-hire/] so severe that companies are deploying robots primarily because there are not enough humans available to hire. A Reuters/Nikkei survey confirmed that labor shortages, not cost-cutting, are the primary force pushing Japanese firms toward AI and robotics adoption. Toyota, Mitsubishi Electric, and Honda are scaling physical AI systems as a workforce substitute rather than a workforce reduction. Japan is the only major economy in which AI deployment functions as a solution to a labor shortage rather than a cause of one. In Africa, the problem runs in yet another direction. At the 2026 Future of Jobs Summit [https://news.sap.com/africa/2026/05/2026-future-of-jobs-summit-why-sas-future-workforce-must-adapt-faster-to-survive-the-ai-revolution/]in Sandton, South African business leaders and policymakers described an urgent collision between a worsening unemployment crisis and accelerating AI adoption. Youth unemployment among South Africans aged 15 to 34 stands at 45.8%. The jobs that AI is beginning to reach in South Africa never fully materialized for young workers there in the first place. A report published in Ghana this week [https://www.modernghana.com/news/1498226/africa-is-not-losing-jobs-to-ai-it-is-losing.amp] argues that Africa’s real AI labor risk is not mass displacement but a failure to build skills fast enough. Youth unemployment among Ghanaians aged 15 to 35 already stands near 21%. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 [https://www.weforum.org/press/2025/01/future-of-jobs-report-2025-78-million-new-job-opportunities-by-2030-but-urgent-upskilling-needed-to-prepare-workforces/] projects that automation will displace 92 million jobs globally by 2030 while creating 170 million new roles. Those new roles, however, require advanced digital proficiency that most African workers currently have no path to acquire. The UN Economic Commission for Africa [https://www.uneca.org/stories/ai-and-jobs-in-africa-turning-disruption-into-opportunity] convened more than 200 participants earlier this year to examine whether AI will drive job creation or labor market disruption across the continent. The participants agreed that the benefits will not arrive automatically or reach workers evenly. In Europe, a new layer of worker-facing regulation took effect this week with almost no fanfare. The European Commission published a Code of Practice [https://digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu/en/policies/regulatory-framework-ai] on marking and labelling AI-generated content on June 10. The Code directly affects content workers, journalists, and media professionals operating in EU markets. The week’s stories span four continents and describe four distinct versions of the same pressure: too many robots arriving too fast in some places, not enough workers available in others, and almost nowhere a legal structure prepared to manage either outcome. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The AI/Labor Report — Wednesday, 10 June 2026

GitLab [https://www.bbntimes.com/technology/gitlab-cuts-14-of-workforce-to-fuel-ai-agentic-era-ambitions] reported revenue of $264 million last quarter, up 23% year over year. It beat analyst expectations. Then it laid off 350 people. The company calls its restructuring GitLab Act 2 [https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/], a repositioning for what it describes as the “agentic era” of software development, in which autonomous AI agents handle coding, reviewing, deploying, and maintaining software under human oversight. The savings from cutting 350 jobs go directly into GitLab’s AI agent platform, Duo, which generated roughly $20 million in committed recurring revenue after its first full quarter. Management expects no material revenue from Duo in fiscal 2026. A profitable company is trading its current human workforce for a product that will not pay off this year. Listen on Apple Podcasts [https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-ai-labor-report/id1896663061] That pattern repeats across the industry with reliable consistency. The organization does not need to be struggling. Revenue growth is beside the point. What drives the restructuring is the calculation that AI agents will multiply productivity per remaining employee while reducing the total headcount required. GitLab is simply one of the most candid companies about naming that logic publicly. The wage data coming out of Europe and the United Kingdom shows the downstream consequence for individual workers. An Oxford University study of more than 10 million UK job postings [https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/02/ai-improving-wages-job-quality/] found that candidates with AI-related skills command a 23% wage premium on average. A Master’s degree carries a 13% premium. A Bachelor’s degree carries 8%. AI proficiency now outperforms formal educational credentials in immediate labor market returns. The same research found that AI skills helped older workers and candidates without advanced degrees improve their hiring prospects substantially when those skills appeared on a resume, particularly when supported by a recognized certificate. The catch is in what happens to the workers on the other side of that divide. An IMF staff discussion note published this year [https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2026/01/09/bridging-skill-gaps-for-the-future-new-jobs-creation-in-the-ai-age-572136] finds that about one in ten job vacancies in advanced economies now demands at least one new AI-related skill. Those vacancies post higher wages. They also correlate with lower employment in occupations with high AI exposure and low complementarity with AI tools, posing direct challenges for younger workers entering those fields. The labor market is not simply rewarding AI fluency. It is simultaneously defunding the entry points that workers once used to build the experience that eventually earns those higher wages. A LinkedIn report presented at Chatham House on June 9 [https://www.chathamhouse.org/events/all/standard-event/ai-work-and-future-global-competitiveness] puts a headline number on the productive upside: AI could unlock up to $6.6 trillion in capacity for businesses in the U.S., UK, France, Germany, and India if implemented across all work tasks. The LinkedIn framing is the one corporate communications departments will circulate internally. The IMF framing is the one workers in AI-exposed roles should read alongside it. Both documents describe the same economy. They assign the gains and the costs to different people. Today, GitLab holds its Transcend conference [https://www.thestreet.com/employment/github-rival-shuts-offices-cuts-100s-of-workers-gitlab], where the company is expected to release the next wave of its agentic AI product roadmap. The announcements will name specific developer tasks that AI agents are slated to absorb next. That list will be worth tracking closely, because each item on it represents work that currently requires a human being. The political response to all of this arrived from an unexpected direction this week. Senator Bernie Sanders announced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act [https://fortune.com/2026/06/03/bernie-sanders-ai-ownership-sovereign-wealth-fund-electrification/], which would impose a one-time 50% tax on AI company stock paid in shares, depositing that equity into a public fund giving ordinary Americans voting rights, board representation, and eventually a direct payment. The proposal is built on a straightforward argument: AI is built on publicly funded research, trained on publicly generated data, and deployed in ways that displace workers who have no recourse under current law. The public, Sanders argues, should own a share of what it helped create. The AI/Labor Report is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met privately with Sanders [https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/06/nation/trump-sanders-and-altman-all-talking-about-public-ownership-in-ai/] and said he also wants the public to have equity in AI companies, though he declined to support the 50% threshold. President Trump told reporters Friday [https://fortune.com/2026/06/05/trump-partnership-openai-anthropic-xai-nationalization-bernie-sanders-altman/] that the U.S. government may take direct equity stakes in OpenAI, Anthropic, and xAI, calling it “a beautiful thing.” The left and the right and the CEO of the most powerful AI company in the world are now circling the same populist anxiety. None of them have agreed on anything. Workers displaced by the tools those companies sell are still waiting for a law that requires anyone to tell them why. BUY NOW! [https://wimdodson.gumroad.com/l/gods_in_the_machine?_gl=1*19da5a0*_ga*MTEwMjE2MDkwMy4xNzc2OTY4MDQy*_ga_6LJN6D94N6*czE3NzY5NjgwNDEkbzEkZzEkdDE3NzY5NjgxNzIkajU5JGwwJGgw] Get the NEW Book that exposes the Narratives Tech uses to build its AI Empire. $4.95 flat fee for Kindle, Nook, Tablets, and Mobile. No subscription required.3.5-hr reading time. Get full access to The AI/Labor Report at ailabor.substack.com/subscribe [https://ailabor.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]