- AI evolution — key developmentsGemini 4 Carbon tops the leaderboard as OpenAI halves the price of computer use
- AI & work — displacement and transformationProfits up, payrolls down: from Amex to Ita Airways
- Automation and reskillingBargaining over the machine: unions push AI into contracts as Italy's law takes effect
- New professions and opportunitiesPrompting no longer pays; building with AI does
- Ethics and normative debateFrom Rome to Sacramento, the machine may advise but may not dismiss
- The risks of AIAnthropic lists its own risks as Big Tech's cash flow turns negative
- Authoritative voicesHinton in Vienna, Altman at Stanford, Pichai on self-improving AI
Two days before reporting a quarter that beat expectations, Microsoft did something it had never done: it invited about 60,000 employees in four countries, more than a quarter of its workforce, to leave voluntarily in exchange for a package. Read alongside the earnings, the offer shows where Big Tech's money is moving.
The pattern across the year is hard to miss: an early-retirement offer to about 8,750 US staff in the spring, 4,800 layoffs in July and now an offer to a pool seven times larger. Cloudnews, which puts Microsoft's 2026 spending on AI and data centres at about $175bn, notes that headcount had already fallen by 5,000 in the last fiscal year. For an employer, a voluntary exit has an obvious advantage: it reduces staff without firing anyone, and so without collective procedures, statutory notices or any need to say how much automation has to do with it. Microsoft has not linked the offer to AI.
That is why the episode matters beyond Redmond. Since 23 October Article 41 of Italy's Decree 179 has voided dismissals decided by an algorithm alone; California will follow in July 2027 and, from January, will make employers declare when a mass layoff is driven by AI. Those rules guard the moment of decision. A voluntary exit is not a decision about an individual worker, so none of them reaches it. If workforce reductions run through buyouts and unfilled vacancies, automation's effect on employment escapes both the statistics and the law.
Labour is funding the data centres. Two of the three cloud giants ended the quarter with negative free cash flow, and the market punished them. As long as compute spending outruns revenue, pressure on payroll will persist even at profitable companies.
Read Anthropic's S-1 in full. Ahead of a debut expected in late November, the filing is the first public account of a frontier lab's finances and risks: losses, customer concentration, security incidents. It is the most complete document on the sector available today.
Italian employers have new paperwork. With Decree 179 in force, companies using AI in HR must update their risk assessment and staff notices. Ita Airways shows AI starting to appear among the stated grounds for collective dismissals, and those grounds will now be read against the new law.
Technical analysis of the stocks mentioned. Platinum pages for the tickers appearing in this edition: Amazon (AMZN) · American Express (AXP) · Barclays (BARC) · CoreWeave (CRWV) · Ford Motor (F) · Alphabet (GOOGL) · HSBC (HSBA) · IREN (IREN) · Microsoft (MSFT) · Nebius (NBIS) · NVIDIA (NVDA).