Snap chief executive Evan Spiegel laid off 1,000 people on Wednesday, April 15 — 16 percent of the company's full-time workforce — and closed more than 300 open roles. [1] In the 8-K memo announcing the cuts, Spiegel pointed to "rapid advancements in artificial intelligence" as the reason smaller teams could now carry the load, and disclosed that AI now generates more than 65 percent of Snap's new code. [2] The stock rose more than 10 percent in premarket trading on the news and closed 11 percent up on the day. [2]

The memo is the first from a major tech company to name AI-displaces-developer as the cause of a layoff and get rewarded by the market. Meta cut 8,000 earlier in the week. Morgan Stanley cut 2,500 the week before. [3] Neither invoked AI directly. Spiegel did. "We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives, including Snapchat+, enhanced ad platform performance, and efficiency improvements in our Snap Lite infrastructure," he wrote. [3]

The 65-percent figure is the one that will matter. It is specific, verifiable against production telemetry and contradicts a year of executive pieties that AI "augments" rather than replaces software engineers. [2] Snap said it expects to cut more than $500 million in annualized costs by the second half of 2026, with $95 million to $130 million in layoff-related charges booked mostly to the second quarter. [2] First-quarter revenue is expected up 12 percent to roughly $1.53 billion. [2]

The pressure came from Irenic Capital Management, the activist holder of a 2.5 percent economic interest pushing Snap to shut the cash-burning Specs smart-glasses unit. [2] Layoffs.fyi counts 71,440 tech jobs cut across 80 companies this year. [2] Spiegel's memo moved the justification into the open and the market validated it.

-- THEO KAPLAN, San Francisco