Trump’s AI czar David Sacks insists recent layoffs aren’t driven by AI

Sacks dismisses AI-driven layoff panic

The fresh wave of layoffs at tech giants has whipped up fears that jobs are being wiped out because of AI-driven automation. In response, David Sacks who was appointed by Donald Trump to oversee AI and crypto policy challenged that narrative: much of the panic about lost jobs to AI is overblown. While AI tools grow increasingly powerful and common, many tasks require human judgment, prompting, and verification, Sacks says. And those are jobs AI cannot replace.

In an X post, Sacks said, “AI models still need to be prompted and verified, often iteratively, to drive business value,” and dismissed the notion that there was going to be some type of near-term apocalypse of mass unemployment via artificial intelligence.

Recent data tends to support Sacks' stance. A November 2025 survey by Goldman Sachs found that only about 11 percent of companies it polled were actively using AI as justification for layoffs. Instead, the majority are still using AI as a productivity booster rather than a cost-cutting substitute for staff. The survey points out that firms across industries are more likely to deploy AI to boost revenue or make operations more efficient than to pare headcount.

This even includes major corporate layoffs, such as those announced by Amazon, which have been officially framed by leadership in terms of reorganisations for agility rather than the result of automation or AI-driven transformation. The CEO of Amazon recently came forward to say that the job cuts are not financial or AI-driven but part of a broader effort to restructure the corporate workforce.

Sacks contends that AI cannot yet fully replace human employees in jobs that call for complex judgment, context, creativity, or ethical decision-making. His stance is not unlike that of other leaders in the field, such as Andrew Ng and Sundar Pichai, who similarly say while AI has huge potential to enhance productivity, human judgment will always be needed.

That said, Sacks does not rule out structural change in the economy. He says AI will reshape the nature of work rather than eliminate it; new types of jobs are opening up, and demand will shift toward skills such as verification, prompt-engineering, and overseeing AI-driven workflows.

In the landscape of fear and uncertainty, the message by Sacks urgently calls for realism. He argues that technology in and of itself is not the enemy; it's how it's implemented that is. And as firms restructure for evolving markets, the root causes of layoffs may be more related to business strategy, economic cycles, and corporate culture than to artificial intelligence.