Block’s AI-fueled layoffs are a stark reminder of how little protection even the most future-facing roles have in today’s tech economy—and how quickly the ground can shift beneath the people building that future.
“We’re already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company,” he wrote in a post on X.
The announcement, delivered just ahead of Block’s earnings report, sent shares up more than 20% in after-hours trading. In a Thursday note, Morningstar Senior Equity Analyst Brett Horn wrote that Block’s fourth-quarter growth accelerated meaningfully and that management’s 2026 guidance calls for material margin improvement as the company dramatically lowers its headcount. He maintained an $83 fair value estimate.
Still, Horn cautioned: “The long-term impact of dramatically reducing staff and betting on AI productivity gains is uncertain, in our view.”
Hours passed without clarity. “I don’t know. Do I have a job? Do I not have a job?” she recalls. Near 12:30 a.m., she said, “I opened the computer, and I just looked, and there I saw the DocuSign, basically the official termination process, and that I read through and had to sign, and then I have a meeting today to basically tell me how to return the computer and things like that. So at least that meant I could sleep, because then I knew, actually, I don’t have a job anymore.”
O’Brien had been working on Goose, Block’s open-source AI agent framework built around the Model Context Protocol. She says the team was “on the bleeding edge,” rapidly shipping automations—from tools that generate release notes and videos in minutes to agentic flows that let users order food through ChatGPT, powered by Block’s payments rails.
She is careful not to single out Dorsey, her managers, or Block’s leadership, describing the move instead as a binary “light switch” decision about risk and survival—one that other companies may soon confront.
