Fei Zhaojun's boss asked him a simple question this month: could AI soon replace human coders? Two weeks later, Fei and 160 of his colleagues in Beijing were laid off. It reads like exactly the story everyone expects from 2026, and in China's case, it largely is. But a new Harvard Business Review analysis, citing Goldman Sachs research, argues that most of the layoffs getting blamed on AI elsewhere aren't actually AI's doing at all.
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This week's Paper Cut is about the gap between the layoffs AI is actually causing and the ones getting blamed on it anyway, plus what employers are quietly admitting about the rest of the deal with their people.
