Snapchat CEO lays off 1,000, citing ‘rapid advancements’ in AI

So Snapchat's Evan Spiegel has decided that the best way to handle 'rapid advancements' in AI is to show 1,000 people the door—roughly 16% of the workforce—while boasting that over 65% of new code is now AI-generated. Because nothing says 'increased velocity' like a mass redundancy email and the hollow promise that smaller teams can magically handle the same workload. It's the same corporate euphemism playbook we saw from Atlassian and Block just last week, where 'strategic pivots' and 'AI-driven efficiency' become synonyms for letting people go while the C-suite pockets the savings.

Spiegel's justification—that AI reduces 'repetitive work'—is particularly rich given that Snap's share price has been in the doldrums for years, and this looks more like a desperate cost-cutting exercise dressed up in techno-optimist garb. The company claims these layoffs will 'increase velocity', but for whom? Certainly not the 1,000 employees now facing the job market, where every other tech firm is pulling the same lever. It's almost impressive how seamlessly 'rapid advancements' morphs from a press-release buzzphrase into a human-resources termination notice.

What's truly galling is the timing: this comes just as the UK government is throwing £500 million at 'Sovereign AI' to supposedly create jobs, while actual companies are using the same technology to eliminate them. Spiegel's move isn't an innovation strategy—it's a spreadsheet calculation, one that treats people as line items to be optimised away. When over 65% of your code is AI-generated, you'd think you'd need more engineers to manage the complexity, not fewer. But then, that would require actual long-term thinking, not quarterly earnings calls.