The message from Thursday’s monthly update on US job cuts was unequivocal: AI’s impacting tech-company payrolls one way or the other.

Although overall, economy-wide layoff announcements were down by half from January through April versus the same period a year ago (when Elon Musk’s DOGE initiative culled federal payrolls and threatened government contractors), tech job cuts were up by a third during the first four months of 2026.

In April alone, tech firms tipped well more than 33,000 cuts, accounting for 40% of total layoff announcements. All told, tech job cuts in 2026 are approaching 85,000, the most since 2023, when the sector was under immense shareholder pressure to cut costs after over-hiring during the pandemic.

April’s 83,387 overall layoff announcements constituted a meaningful increase from March’s total, which itself represented an uptick from February.

As alluded to above, the DOGE distortion (and, although not quantifiable, the effect of “Liberation Day” on payroll decisions this time last year), distorts the YoY comp. That’s the caveat to the 50% YoY drop in YTD job cuts.

“Regardless of whether individual [tech] jobs are being replaced by AI, the money for those roles is,” Andy Challenger said Thursday. That’s the crux of the issue: If you’re a tech worker, it doesn’t so much matter whether you were rendered superfluous by a model you helped build or your role’s considered expendable in the context of escalatory capex. Either way, you were laid off.

As the Challenger release went on to note, April marked the second straight month during which AI was the most-cited factor for job cuts. For 2026, it’s the third-leading cause, accounting for nearly 50,000 layoff plans, or around 16% of all job cut announcements.

At the end of Q1, AI was the fifth-leading cause of job cuts. So, April’s AI-related layoffs reshuffled the leaderboard, with AI leapfrogging two spots.

As for hiring plans, they were quite subdued in April. The Challenger series reflects just 10,049, down dramatically both MoM and YoY.

Ironically, the government category led all sectors for hiring plans last month. Irony atop irony: Tech announced the second-most new hires in April, although at just 1,980 announced positions to 33,361 cuts, the outlook seems pretty bleak for humans pursuing careers in a sector hell-bent on making our species redundant.