REDMOND, WA — Software engineer Marcus Tien learned Thursday morning that his eleven-year career at a major cloud-services firm had ended, and that as part of his exit benefits he would receive a complimentary six-month subscription to Copilot Forge, the generative-AI coding assistant cited by name in the company’s internal memo as the reason his position was no longer necessary.
The firm, one of four flagship tech companies to announce mass layoffs this week, eliminated 7,400 roles Thursday in what executives described as a “strategic reallocation of compute spend.” In the same release, the company reaffirmed its commitment to a previously announced $80 billion AI infrastructure buildout, a figure roughly equal to the lifetime earnings of every employee being walked to the parking lot.
“We are not cutting jobs, we are unlocking capacity,” said Priya Anand, vice president of People Velocity, in a 14-second video addressed to staff and apparently filmed from inside a moving SUV. Anand declined to clarify whether the capacity being unlocked referred to office square footage, payroll, or the engineers themselves, who as of Thursday afternoon had considerable capacity unlocked indeed.
According to the severance documentation reviewed by departing employees, the AI subscription perk entitles former staffers to 500 free monthly prompts of the model trained, in part, on the codebases they wrote. A FAQ included with the offer notes that the assistant “may occasionally hallucinate function names” and recommends, where possible, that users consult a senior engineer — a role the company has now reduced by approximately 38 percent.
A spokesperson for the firm clarified that the layoffs were unrelated to financial performance, citing record quarterly earnings and a stock price that rose another 4.2 percent within minutes of the announcement. Analysts at the boutique research desk Cantilever Group said the move was consistent with sector-wide patterns. “Investors want to hear two things,” said Cantilever partner Devon Lossi. “That you are spending unimaginable sums on AI, and that you are spending nothing on anyone who knows how it works. The companies threading that needle are the ones being rewarded.”
Industry-wide, more than 34,000 tech workers have been let go in the first sixteen days of January, the vast majority at firms that simultaneously reported strong earnings and announced expanded AI commitments. At a Tuesday investor call, one CEO described the layoffs as “a difficult but exciting chapter,” a phrase the company’s AI meeting-summarizer subsequently rendered as “a difficult and exciting chapter,” which was then circulated internally as the official version.
Tien, reached by phone Thursday evening, said he had already used his complimentary Copilot Forge access to draft a cover letter for a position at a different cloud-services firm, which on Friday morning announced 4,000 layoffs of its own. He noted that the assistant, when asked to summarize his eleven years of contributions, produced a three-bullet list and a suggestion to add “more impact verbs.”
“It told me to quantify my achievements,” Tien said. “So I told it I built the system that’s now firing me. It marked that as a strong example.”