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CEOs are catching AI fever, and workers are getting the bill. This week cuts hit Wix, ClickUp, BigID, Branch, and Bankless while the “layoffs aren’t real” crowd gets wrecked by the data. The smart move now is simple: prove your AI leverage, document the last-mile work, and chase the companies still hiring real operators.

• 🚨 The Big Story: Box CEO names the bug: CEOs don't know what AI can't do.

• 📉 Layoff Report: Wix, ClickUp, BigID, Branch, Bankless add 1,500+ to May's tally.

• 📊 Trends & Data: 1The "Layoffs Aren’t Real" Rebuttal Kit

• 🏢 Companies to Watch: OpenRouter, Hark, Stord, and Anthropic are absorbing the talent.

🚨: The Big Story

Box CEO names the bug: CEOs don't know what AI can't do.

What happened: On May 24, Box founder Aaron Levie posted to his 2.7M X followers that 'CEOs are uniquely prone to AI psychosis because they're sufficiently distant from the last mile of work that still has to happen to generate most value with AI.' TechCrunch's Julie Bort picked it up May 27 as the theory of the year: top execs play with a demo, see the happy path, and conclude that agents can do the work, without ever reviewing code, debugging a hallucinated library call, or fine-tuning a model on the company's own contracts. TechCrunch, Levie on X.

Why it matters: This is the first time a sitting big-tech CEO has put a name on the thing your manager has been gaslighting you about. Layoffs.fyi has 115,430 tech workers cut from 152 companies in the first five months of 2026, nearly matching all of 2025 (124,636 across 275 companies) in less than half the time. Most of those press releases cited AI. And it's the same week ClickUp's Zeb Evans publicly cheered cutting 22% of staff after rolling out 3,000 internal agents, calling it a '100x org.' If Levie is right, those numbers aren't strategy; they're a syndrome.

Our take: The research backs Levie, hard. UC Berkeley's California Management Review found 'no robust relationship between AI adoption and aggregate productivity gain.' The NBER named the gap: a 'productivity paradox' where perceived gains run well ahead of measured ones. MIT FutureTech ran thousands of agent evaluations and concluded LLMs won't hit even 'minimally sufficient quality' on most text tasks until around 2029. HBR's May write-up flagged the next bottleneck: when everyone uses AI to ship more, the choke point becomes the executives who have to approve all of it. So the bosses cutting humans to scale AI are also the bosses about to become the bottleneck their own AI tools created. Meanwhile, the people walked out of ClickUp, Wix, BigID, and Bankless this week were the 'last mile' Levie says CEOs don't actually understand. The diagnosis lands. The bill is being paid by the wrong people.

What to watch:

• Whether 'AI psychosis' becomes the boardroom shorthand that lets a CFO push back on a CEO's headcount plan. (The phrase is now in play, and pushback is overdue.)

• Q3 earnings calls that quietly rehire roles cut in Q1 and Q2. Gartner has already forecast that about 50% of AI-attributed layoffs will be reversed by 2027.

• Lawsuits and EEOC complaints around AI-driven selection. Once execs go on record saying 'AI does the work,' their layoff defense gets harder to write.

Your move:

• Save the TechCrunch piece and the Levie thread. The next time a manager hand-waves about AI productivity, you have receipts from a CEO and three peer-reviewed sources.

• Treat your job like 'the last mile.' Document the messy, judgment-heavy parts of your work in your brag doc; that's the value AI can't replace yet, and the value an honest interview screen will reward.

📉 Layoff Report (Who got cut, how, and why)

Wix, ClickUp, BigID, Branch, Bankless add 1,500+ to May's tally.

• Wix: Announced May 25. Up to 1,000 cuts (about 20% of staff), the largest in Wix's history. Tied to a weak Q1 and a stock that dropped roughly a third. The full RTO mandate earlier this year now reads as Phase 1. Globes

• ClickUp: Announced May 21. 290 cuts (22% of the 1,300-person workforce). Reframed as a '100x org' restructure with $1M salary bands for survivors who build AI systems. See Big Story. TechCrunch

• BigID: Announced May 26. 150 cuts (about 20% of the workforce), including 20 to 30 at the Tel Aviv R&D center. The data-security unicorn called it an 'AI-first' rebuild. Globes

• Quantic Dream: Announced May 21. ~95 people cut (around a quarter of staff) after the studio shut down its live-service MOBA, Spellcasters Chronicles. Detroit: Become Human's developer keeps Star Wars Eclipse in motion. Kotaku

• Bankless: Confirmed May 22. Quiet majority-team layoff with no public announcement. Co-founder Ryan Sean Adams marked it as 'the end of phase one' for the crypto media company. Always check Glassdoor and Blind before you take an offer at a media startup quoting traffic from 2022. American Bazaar

Bottom line: Through May 26, 2026, the running count is 144,355 tech workers cut across 344 events, about 982 a day per Skillsyncer. The 'AI-first' framing is now showing up in the press release before the headcount number. If you hear it from your CEO, take the meeting as the warning shot.

🧑‍✈️ Career CoPilot (Prove you work with AI, not just near it)

Build the AI-operator story before your CEO writes one for you.

This week's news is the same trade twice: cut humans, rebrand survivors as AI operators (Meta, then ClickUp). Whether you stay or get cut, the next round of resumes and interviews will reward the person who can point to a specific AI workflow they own. Five moves this week.

• Ship one small AI-leverage project at your current job by Friday. An internal agent, a prompt-driven workflow, an automation that saved your team an hour. Document the before / after with a number.

• Add a 'Key Impact' line under your current role on your resume that names a tool and a result. Example: 'Built a Claude-based agent that cut ticket triage time 38%.' Concrete beats clever.

• Rewrite your top three bullets in Context, Action, Result order. Drop 'Responsible for' anywhere it appears; LLM rubric scoring penalizes task language.

• On LinkedIn, pin the 3 skills closest to your target role. Get verified badges where you can. Verified profiles surface 30% higher in recruiter searches under the 2025 ranking update.

• Pick one Series B AI company from Companies to Watch and email a founder one specific reason you want to talk, not the careers portal. Same-day reply rates are 3 to 5 times higher than cold inbound within 30 days of a fresh raise.

📊  Trends & Data (What the numbers are saying)

The "Layoffs Aren’t Real" Rebuttal Kit

The disconnect, in numbers. U-3 says 4.3%. The other five indicators tell a different story.

• U-6 (counts discouraged workers and involuntary part-timers) hit 8.2% in April, up from 8.0%. Part-time-for-economic-reasons jumped 445,000 to 4.9 million in a single month.

• 1.8 million Americans have been out of work 27+ weeks (25.3% of the unemployed; 34.5% for workers 55+). White-collar searches now run 6 to 9 months.

• Challenger logged 83,387 US layoff announcements in April alone, the third-worst April since 2009. AI was the top cited reason for the second month running. YTD: 300,749.

• Federal workforce is down ~300,000 since January 2025 (largest peacetime government layoff in US history). UPS is cutting 30,000 in 2026. The "tech-only" framing stopped being accurate around Q4 2025.

• ~30% of online postings never result in a hire; 68% of hiring managers admit to keeping listings active with no intent to fill. St. Louis Fed: 80% of the rise in unemployment since 2023 came from lower hiring, not higher firing.

What this means for you: When someone calls the layoff story overblown, they're reading one chart and ignoring the other six. Cite U-6, the long-term unemployed count, and the hires rate. Then go back to your search; the data says the recovery isn't coming on its own.

👀 Companies to Watch (Fresh money, open roles, and reasons to apply now)

OpenRouter, Hark, Stord, and Anthropic are absorbing the talent.

• OpenRouter: $113M Series B (May 26) led by CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund. The model-routing layer between AI apps and frontier models is suddenly load-bearing infra; OpenRouter is hiring engineering, infra, and developer relations. Coverage

• Hark: $700M+ Series A at a $6B valuation (mid-May). The kind of round that funds a doubling of staff inside 12 months. Engineering, GTM, and infra are all in play. Worth a founder email even if 'Series A' suggests small. Coverage

• Stord: $250M Series F (May 26) for cloud supply chain and logistics. Less hype than AI infra, far more open roles in operations, software, and ops engineering. Useful if you want out of pure consumer tech. Coverage

• Anthropic: ~392 open roles and still pulling senior talent from OpenAI, xAI, Google, and Microsoft. Comp for engineering and research is in the $300K to $490K range. Apply direct; recruiter referral isn't required. Careers

• OpenAI's Tomoro / Deployment Company: OpenAI's new $4B 'Deployment Company' joint venture absorbed Tomoro's ~150 engineers in May and is staffing up Forward Deployed Engineer roles. Closer to enterprise consulting than research, but the comp follows OpenAI's bands. Coverage