Jack Dorsey Fired Half His Company

Jack Dorsey fired half his company, wore a hat that said LOVE to the all-hands, and blamed Anthropic's Opus 4.6.

I'm not exaggerating. In a WIRED interview he named the specific model that triggered his decision to cut 4,000 jobs. "Something really shifted in December," he said. His vision: rebuild Block as a "mini AGI" with "no management hierarchy whatsoever."

The stock jumped 25%. Wall Street loved it.

Two weeks before the big announcement, Block's engineering lead called the same layoffs "performance-related." His words: "clear performance gaps." Employees called that a smokescreen. Then Dorsey reframes the whole thing as an AI strategy.

So which is it? Performance problems or AI transformation?

His own people aren't buying it. One current employee: "Top-down mandates to use large language models are crazy. If the tool were good, we'd all just use it." Others told The Guardian the tools still need constant direction. "You can't really AI that."

Meanwhile, an ML engineer who built Block's fraud detection watched his own role disappear. The system he built actually did replace human review. That part is real.

Both things are true. AI is replacing specific, pattern-based work. But firing 4,000 people from a profitable company and calling it an "AI strategy" isn't transformation. It's a press release.

In a recent video, Nate B Jones put it better than I can: "You have 500 people. Each just got 5 to 10x more capable. The correct response is not 'I can run my company with 50 people.' The correct response is 'I have the capacity of 5,000 people. What was I previously unable to do?'"

Dorsey got handed a force multiplier and used it as a pink slip.