Tech's 'AI layoff' announcements have cost the firms almost 10% in 30 days

U.S. tech companies that publicly cited AI in 2026 layoff announcements have trailed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days that followed, according to a Financial Times analysis cited by TechCrunch's running list. Several of the same firms have been moving thousands of other employees into AI roles while making the cuts.

The freshest case is Monday.com, a Tel Aviv-based work management software company that competes with Asana, Atlassian's Jira, and Smartsheet. On July 22, the company filed a Form 6-K with the SEC announcing a roughly 20% workforce reduction, about 620 people, framed as alignment with its "AI Work Platform" strategy. The filing describes the plan as reflecting an "ongoing transformation of its product, marketing, and go-to-market strategy" toward a "leaner, more focused operating model" as the company invests in what the document calls an "AI-driven growth strategy."

In a LinkedIn memo to staff, co-founder Eran Zinman pushed back on the AI-as-cause reading. "This was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI," he wrote, positioning the move instead as organizational fit for the AI-first vision the company laid out roughly a year ago when it rebranded around a platform-wide AI push.

The gap between those two statements is what the market has been pricing. The FT analysis, again cited via TechCrunch, put the broader cuts in scope: U.S. tech companies have slashed nearly 140,000 jobs since the start of 2026, with Amazon, Oracle, Meta, and Microsoft alone accounting for almost 50,000 of those cuts while spending hundreds of billions of dollars on AI data center buildouts. The same analysis found that companies citing AI as a factor in job cuts underperformed the Nasdaq by almost 10% in the 30 trading days following their announcements. That underperformance is the part of the data Monday.com's filing does not address.

According to the TechCrunch roundup, Meta moved roughly 7,000 employees into new AI-focused roles even as it laid off 8,000 others earlier in 2026. The same roundup reports IBM saying it is tripling entry-level hiring for AI and hybrid-cloud roles alongside its recent cuts. Anthropic and OpenAI are hiring rapidly as pure-AI labs absorb talent shed elsewhere in the industry. The Meta and IBM figures are characterized in the TechCrunch piece; primary statements from the companies would settle the numbers cleanly, and that is the next place to look. The pattern, even at one remove, is what the AI-hiring pages at the pure-AI labs confirm by their volume.

Monday.com's underlying numbers do not show a company in obvious distress. The 6-K projects $45 million to $55 million in net restructuring charges from the move and still guides up to 20% year-over-year revenue growth for 2026. Those are forward-looking statements from a foreign-private-issuer filing, not reported results, but they sit in a different register than a company that has run out of room to cut.

The filing language is doing real work even where the technology is not. "AI Work Platform" and "AI-driven growth strategy" are labels that help boards file a workforce reduction as strategic rather than financial. Zinman's memo gives the same move a different gloss: a cultural reorientation around AI that happens to coincide with a 20% cut. Neither framing is provably false. Both are usable. The market is voting on which one it believes by which one it prices.

The running list of companies that have publicly cited AI in layoff announcements now runs to 20, with Microsoft's July 9 cut of about 4,800 roles, 2.1% of its global workforce and most of them in Xbox the entry just before Monday.com. Zinman's memo and the 6-K will sit in the same regulatory filing for the next decade. So will the 30-day chart that follows each one.