Polymarket bets on tech layoffs surge. But is AI replacing workers or just concentrating them?

Meta is eliminating roughly 8,000 positions starting May 20, while OpenAI plans to nearly double its staff by year’s end, highlighting a widening divide in the technology sector between companies cutting workers and those building the AI systems driving those cuts.

The Meta layoffs, affecting about 10 percent of its 79,000 employees, come as more than 95,000 tech workers have lost jobs across over 240 separate events in 2026 so far, according to TrueUp’s tracking data.

The first quarter alone saw between 78,000 and 91,000 cuts compared to about 30,000 in the same period last year.

Companies are pointing directly to artificial intelligence as the reason.

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg said earlier this year that projects once requiring big teams can now be handled by “a single very talented person.” Salesforce head Marc Benioff said his support staff dropped from 9,000 people to about 5,000 “because I need less heads.” Amazon’s Andy Jassy told workers the company expected new AI tools to “reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains.”

Prediction markets called Meta cuts before official news

Prediction market bettors saw Meta’s cuts coming before Reuters reported them Friday. On Polymarket, a betting platform backed by Intercontinental Exchange, traders put about $112,000 into markets tracking Meta’s employee count and stock price. One market gave 96 percent odds that Meta ended the quarter above 75,000 workers and 55 percent above 77,000.

Polymarket’s broader tech layoffs market has held at 79 percent, expecting increases throughout the month. Kalshi, a competing platform, has a similar market that crossed $30 million in bets.

Traders are treating the job cuts as positive news. A separate poll also gives 79 percent odds that Meta shares will clear $700 in April. Meta’s stock rose roughly 3 percent when the layoff news first leaked. Bank of America set an $885 price target, projecting $7 billion to $8 billion in yearly savings from the restructuring.

OpenAI moves in the opposite direction with a hiring push

While traditional tech companies are cutting, OpenAI is moving in the opposite direction. The Financial Times reported Saturday that the company plans to grow from 4,500 workers to 8,000 by the end of 2026. Most new hires will go into product development, engineering, research, and sales. The company’s latest funding round valued it at $840 billion.  As reported by Cryptopolitan previously, OpenAI has its own hiring platform to be released mid-2026.

While rival CEO Dario Amodei has spent months warning that engineering jobs, especially coding roles, could vanish faster than expected. “I think coding is going away first, or coding is being done by the AI models first,” he said recently. He predicted AI could write 90 percent of code at many companies soon and said, “in 12 months, AI will essentially be writing all the codes.”

Amodei pointed to changes already happening inside Anthropic. Some engineering leaders no longer write code themselves, just reviewing what AI produces. He warned that “there are whole jobs, whole careers that we’ve built for decades that may not be present.”

Yet Anthropic’s careers page shows about 436 open positions right now. The largest hiring area is Sales with 150 open roles, followed by AI Research & Engineering with 68 positions, including Full-Stack Software Engineer and Performance Engineer roles. Several jobs offer between $320,000 and $405,000 in pay.

A Duke and Federal Reserve banks survey of more than 750 chief financial officers found over 80 percent reported zero productivity gains from AI, even as the same survey projected roughly 502,000 AI-related job cuts in 2026, nine times the 2025 figure.

Meta reports first-quarter earnings on April 29. Then comes the May 20 layoff wave. How both events play out will show whether the AI efficiency story holds up or falls apart.

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