Gavin Newsom intervenes amid historic tech layoffs

Gov. Gavin Newsom is addressing the catastrophic layoffs that are taking place across the state right now as big tech companies transition toward artificial intelligence.

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Newsom announced in on Thursday that he will try to get ahead of a complete erasure of entry-level white-collar workers as a result of artificial intelligence. Dario Amodei, CEO of the surging San Francisco AI company Anthropic, has suggested that 50% of the workforce, particularly entry-level jobs, could be gone within five years’ time. Amodei has since changed his tune and suggested that AI will instead just shift the daily tasks that workers do and increase their productivity. 

No matter those predictions, tech layoffs keep happening. And most of them are affecting workers in California, which is home to “33 of the top 50 private AI companies in the world,” according to a news release from Newsom’s office.

This week, 8,000 workers worldwide got laid off from Meta, which was about 10% of its company. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it was in an effort to expand his company’s AI presence. LinkedIn announced plans to cut over 600 California jobs this summer, the majority of which are in the Bay Area. Many hundreds more have been let go at other Bay Area companies, like Salesforce and Oracle, which moved its headquarters to Texas in 2020. And it’s happened most notably over the last two years, as the new technology really began to take off.

Newsom warned at a conference Tuesday that in his view tech companies are getting unfair tax breaks while the workforce is suffering, and that AI will move quicker than governments can respond. 

His executive order doesn’t say much will be done immediately. It largely tasks state agencies and departments to conduct various analyses on the impact of AI on the workforce, and gives them, depending on the task, three to six months to do so. Newsom also wants to eventually create AI-specific frameworks around labor, according to the order.

The executive order requires the California Employment Development Department to document the layoffs and publish a dashboard to show AI’s impact on the workforce in California. 

Newsom’s order also calls for creating job-training programs for workers whose jobs will be most impacted, and potentially eliminated, by the transition to AI. 

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Lorena Gonzalez, the president of the California Federation of Labor Unions, indicated to CalMatters in a statement that the executive order isn’t sufficient, though it’s a start.

“It’s not enough to just study the issue, we have to take action now,” she told the outlet. 

Newsom’s response is the first of its kind from a governor in the U.S. It is one of a few emerging ideas on how to remedy the disarray AI has brought to the workforce. There have been proposals in the U.K., Japan and South Korea to consider a universal basic income to offset the loss of income from these layoffs. Chinese workers are also successfully suing their employers after losing their jobs to AI.

Newsom made this announcement on the same day that President Donald Trump, who has taken a noninterventionist approach to the industry, postponed his own executive order on AI. The order would allow the U.S. government to preevaluate AI models ahead of their release. Trump said it was “because I didn’t like certain aspects of it.” He added he didn’t want to do anything to “get in the way” of the industry’s lead ahead of China.