15 Sept 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools
On 15 September 2025 Micha Kaufman, co-founder and chief executive of the online freelance marketplace Fiverr, sent staff a letter announcing what he called a painful reset to turn Fiverr into an AI-first company that is leaner and faster, with a modern AI-focused tech infrastructure, a smaller team and far fewer management layers. A company spokesperson told Reuters that Fiverr was laying off 30% of its workforce, and Reuters reported that the cuts would affect 250 employees; Fiverr had 762 employees at the end of 2024. The Israeli business paper Globes reported that most of the 250 employees who would lose their jobs were based in Israel. Reuters said it was not clear which kinds of jobs would be affected. Kaufman said the transformation would not affect business on the platform or harm its freelancers. No source names an AI tool that took over the dismissed employees' work.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 02/11/2026
2025FranceUnidentified AI translation tool
In a press release of 15 December 2025, the French literary translators' association ATLF and the collective En chair et en os said that over the previous weeks several dozen translators who worked regularly for Harlequin, the romance imprint of HarperCollins France, had received phone calls telling them their collaboration was ending and that their current contracts would be the last. According to the associations, an outside agency, Fluent Planet, would run the books through machine-translation software and recruit freelancers to post-edit the output, and the affected translators were offered only lower-paid post-editing work for the agency. 404 Media reported that HarperCollins said it would start translating Harlequin novels in France using AI. HarperCollins France disputed a full switch: it said no collection is translated by AI alone, spoke of tests against a background of falling sales. Fluent Planet said AI assists the translator. The associations describe a loss of regular income for people who had worked with the publisher for up to twenty years, without unemployment rights as self-employed authors.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 01/11/2026
Event date unknownNetherlandsUnidentified invoice-recognition tool
RTL Nieuws reported on 11 June 2026 that a five-person Dutch accounting firm had done without its bookkeeper since the start of the year because, its director said, AI had made his job unnecessary. Accountancy Vanmorgen reported the next day that the firm dismissed the bookkeeper after AI took over a large part of his work. The director told Accountancy Vanmorgen that RTL's description of AI processing bank data was wrong: invoice recognition had long been automated but needed the bookkeeper to check it, and AI had now taken over that check. The director says the bookkeeper was offered retraining within the firm and declined it, and that he has since found a job elsewhere. The bookkeeper's own account was not reported.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity Media Coverage
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 2 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026
29 Jan 2025Event location unknownUnidentified AI analysis system
Noticias Trabajo reports that a sugar company dismissed its laboratory manager on economic and organisational grounds on 29 January 2025. According to the report, the company cited multimillion-euro losses from a fall in sugar prices and a new model that replaced traditional laboratory analysis with artificial intelligence and remote sensing, which made the physical laboratory he ran unnecessary and led to its closure. He had first been moved to a technician post, which the company then also cut. He challenged the dismissal: the first-instance social court found that the company had calculated his severance on a shortened length of service and a lower daily salary, paying 6,427 euros instead of 8,556 euros, and declared the dismissal unfair. The High Court of Justice of Castilla y Leon (judgment 18/2026) upheld that ruling, finding the shortfall of almost 25% showed a conscious and deliberate intention to pay less. The report says the grounds for the dismissal were valid and that the ruling was not final.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Ongoing
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 01/11/2026
May 2024Event location unknownUnidentified machine-translation tools
Noticias Trabajo and Confilegal report that a translation and interpreting company dismissed a translator on objective grounds in May 2024, after 17 years in the job. According to the dismissal letter as quoted by Confilegal, the sector had been transformed by new technologies reinforced by the appearance of AI, and part of the translations clients used to order had disappeared because clients now did them by their own means. Noticias Trabajo reports that the company cited a fall in revenue and losses of about 11,000 euros in 2023 and 16,471 euros in the first quarter of 2024. The translator challenged the dismissal, arguing that the losses were not proven and that choosing her over the other employee was arbitrary. The social court no. 3 of Valladolid rejected her claim, and the High Court of Justice of Castilla y Leon dismissed her appeal and upheld the dismissal as justified on economic grounds; a training firm's commentary dates that ruling to 15 September 2025. Noticias Trabajo says the ruling was not yet final. The courts' reasoning, as reported, rests on the company's accounts; how much of the decline the AI tools caused was the employer's account.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 01/11/2026
2023United KingdomUnidentified AI tools
The news agency SWNS reported on 29 October 2026 that Rob Illidge, chief executive of Vulse, a LinkedIn employee-advocacy software company he founded in 2019, says he made more than 64% of his staff redundant over three years starting in 2023, nine employees in total, and replaced their work with AI. By his account the company had grown to 14 employees after venture funding; the marketing, sales and development teams went, and graduate roles were more at risk. He says 'AI could do a better job', that the company's AI tools cost 140 pounds a month and that it saves about 100,000 pounds a year in employment costs. The account is the employer's own; no former employee is quoted and no challenge to the redundancies is reported.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 31/10/2026
12 Oct 2026BrazilUnidentified AI tool
A labour court in Castro, Paraná (9th Region Labour Court), annulled a court-appointed expert's report after the employer, in a motion for clarification, reported a hidden sentence at the foot of a page instructing artificial intelligence to contest the report only superficially and not to question the files it cited, according to Diário de Justiça. The expert confirmed the text but said it came from teaching material about AI and was inserted by accident; the court's IT section concluded that it had been formatted deliberately to be invisible. The judge said AI had not been used to write the judgment and that the text did not directly influence it, but annulled the report, later submissions and the judgment, ordered a new examination by another expert without AI tools, fined the expert 5% of the value of the case for bad-faith litigation, cancelled the expert's fees and removed the expert from the court's register. The decision, dated 12 October 2026, can be challenged.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Regulatory Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution disputed · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026
7 Jul 2026Event location unknownUnidentified AI tools
On Tuesday 7 July 2026 Mews, a hotel-management software company with Czech roots, announced that it was letting go about 15 percent of its roughly 1,350 employees, which CzechCrunch put at about 200 people. Its founder said the business was in a very strong position and growing fast, but that artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing the economics of hospitality and can now handle much of the executive part of the professional services that hotels pay for, and that to help its customers become AI-native the company had to become AI-native itself. Its product and technology director told Lupa.cz the company had completed a ground-up review of how work is done in an AI-native world, that the decision was proactive and not a reaction to financial pressure, and that the organisation was being designed around what AI enables. The company said the cuts affected positions across all teams and regions and largely spared customer-facing roles. In October 2026 Lupa.cz reported that employees at the company's Czech head office had formed a trade union within the ICT Union, shortly after a layoff it described as officially due to changes brought by AI; the union wants a collective agreement and to be informed before decisions on layoffs and reorganisations. The sources do not say which roles, if any, were taken over by AI tools, how many dismissed employees worked in the Czech Republic, or what severance they received.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources, 2 underlying accounts · Added 30/10/2026
29 Oct 2026Event location unknownUnidentified coding tool
In a public post to r/Netherlands created on 29 October 2026, a full-stack web developer with ten years' experience writes that a month earlier they were told they would be fired because AI was able to do their job, and that the day of the post was their last day and last paycheck. In replies the poster quotes the boss as saying 'I can just prompt the AI and it seems to be doing what I need', says they had been at the company five years, worked on one month's notice under a Bulgarian employment, and had watched the company's code repository fill with AI commits. The poster also writes that they used AI heavily in the job and that the company wanted to save money. They say they have applied for developer jobs for 30 days without a workable offer and are thinking of leaving coding; they also say they are in no financial trouble. The account is uncorroborated and the employer is not named.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 30/10/2026
16 Dec 2024SpainUnidentified image tool
A Spanish video game studio that went from a profit in 2023 to losses of about 3.5 million euros in 2024, and had notified a court of its insolvency, opened a collective dismissal (ERE) on 30 October 2024 covering 13 of its 83 employees; an agreement was reached and the dismissals took effect in December 2024. According to a judgment of the High Court of Justice of Madrid as reported by EFE, Xataka and a lawyer's analysis, the dismissal letter given to a 3D artist said that images generated with artificial intelligence improved the visual quality of the studio's games and cut production time per scene, that it was adopting an AI-based production process, and that two senior 3D artists were therefore enough, so her post was abolished. The first-instance court held her dismissal fair and she did not appeal. The High Court's judgment 864/2026 of 8 October 2026 concerned a scriptwriter dismissed in the same procedure, whose letter did not mention AI: it dismissed her appeal, leaving her dismissal unfair but not void. Xataka says the letter relied above all on economic and productive causes, that the studio presented AI as a consequence imposed by its clients rather than as a direct cause, and that AI by itself does not justify a dismissal. The studio is not named and the judgment was not read.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Dismissed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 30/10/2026
28 Oct 2026United StatesClaude and ChatGPT
Santiago Schnell, provost of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, resigned and is leaving the college, President Sian Leah Beilock announced on 28 October 2026. The announcement followed the report of an advisory committee she had convened on 25 September after Semafor and the student newspaper The Dartmouth reported that the AI detector Pangram flagged his 2026 op-eds and articles as AI-written. The committee did not use Pangram. Drawing on his Dartmouth Claude enterprise logs and his emails, it found that he used AI to meaningfully alter his writing in violation of at least one publication's AI disclosure requirement, failed to disclose ChatGPT use in a Washington Post column against the newspaper's policy, and was not forthcoming about his AI use. The committee said it was not recommending disciplinary action, and the president said the resignation was his decision. Inside Higher Ed reports that he was due to face a faculty no-confidence vote. He has said AI did not substitute for his own research, judgment or authorship.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Internal Action
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 6 sources · Added 29/10/2026
2026FinlandUnidentified AI tool
Humppila, a municipality of about 2,000 residents in Kanta-Häme, Finland, abolished its administrative director and technical director posts on the new mayor's proposal, which, according to Helsingin Sanomat as relayed by Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, covered 150,000 euros of the municipality's savings need; Yle reports that the two office holders were dismissed in spring 2026 and that the abolitions followed the municipality's need to improve its weak finances. Maaseudun Tulevaisuus, relaying an interview first published by Helsingin Sanomat, reports that according to the mayor both directors' tasks are now done with the help of AI, and quotes the mayor as saying the writing of new appendices to the administrative regulations was done with AI in a day. A municipal statement said the main aim of its reforms was not to increase AI use or shrink the administration but to secure services. The former administrative director told Iltalehti the abolition of the post was unlawful, saying the tasks have not ceased and that AI cannot bear official responsibility or form a ground for dismissal; the mayor says the process was lawful. According to the former director, the abolition was brought into the change negotiations as the only option without the five days' written advance notice the law requires, and the lawyers' union Juristiliitto assessed the negotiations as at least careless and presented the municipality with a claim for full compensation. The former director appealed to the Hämeenlinna Administrative Court in spring 2026 and reports filing a criminal complaint with Häme police on 9 September 2026, which police confirmed receiving without deciding whether to investigate. Finland's Deputy Parliamentary Ombudsman opened an own-initiative inquiry into the use of AI in the municipality's official work, asking what tasks were given to AI and how lawful decision-making and official responsibility are ensured. No tool is named, and no court or Ombudsman finding is reported.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Investigation Opened
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 3 sources · Added 28/10/2026
Sept 2025RussiaUnidentified AI tools
A court in Moscow Region, Russia, ruled in favour of a programmer whose employer had disciplined him and ended his employment, according to court materials reported by TASS on 27 October 2026 and relayed by regional outlets. In court the company's representative said the programmer had performed his duties improperly and had abused artificial intelligence when doing work tasks, which the company said its analytical reports showed. The programmer said the employer had pressed him to leave from September 2025 after he refused to sign an agreement moving him to hourly pay, and that he faced five internal inspections and three disciplinary penalties he disputed. The court found that the employer had ignored his written explanations, partly upheld his claim, changed the recorded ground of dismissal to termination at the employee's initiative, adjusted the dismissal date, lifted the penalties and awarded him over 1.2 million roubles in average earnings for the period of forced absence, plus moral damages and costs.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 28/10/2026
Sept 2022Event location unknownLina (Dukaan AI assistant)
In September 2022 Suumit Shah, founder and chief executive of the e-commerce software startup Dukaan, tweeted that the company had let go of 23 employees that week, explaining that after it shifted its focus from small shops to enterprise and direct-to-consumer brands there was little role for live chat or call support and that it had automated a lot of things, as VCCircle reported. On 10 July 2023 he tweeted that Dukaan had to lay off 90% of its support team because of its AI chatbot, calling the decision tough but necessary, and said the in-house AI assistant had cut response and resolution times and support costs by about 85%. He told CNN that the 23 layoffs were made in September. When asked online what had happened to the dismissed staff, he said he would describe their assistance on LinkedIn. No dismissed employee's account was found, and whether the chatbot was in use when the 2022 cuts were made is not established.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 26/10/2026
Dec 2023Event location unknownGPT-4 (reported)
In a post and comments on r/duolingo on 28 December 2023, a person who says they had worked as a contract translator for Duolingo for five years writes that they were off-boarded about two weeks earlier, that two of their team's four core members were let go, and that the reason given was that AI can produce content and translations, with the two who remained reviewing AI output. In January 2024 Duolingo told TechCrunch, CNN and Semafor that it had cut about 10% of its contractor workforce at the end of 2023. It told CNN that not all of the cuts were due to AI but that contractors were let go to make room for AI-related changes in how content is generated, and told Semafor that calling AI the sole reason would be an oversimplification. It disputed the word layoffs and said only a small minority of contractors were let go as projects wrapped. The translator's account of what they were told is theirs alone; no company statement addresses any individual contractor.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 4 sources · Added 26/10/2026
Event date unknownItalyUnidentified chatbot
In October 2026 Italian outlets, relaying Il Sole 24 Ore, reported that the Agenzia delle Entrate (the Italian Revenue Agency) had suspended two staff members of its first provincial directorate in Naples from their posts for improper use of artificial intelligence and assigned them to study and research duties at the regional directorate, and that it had opened an internal audit. The reports link the measures to judgment 4759/2026 of the Campania second-instance tax court, which, according to these reports, found that the tax office had put questions to online AI systems while checking a company's research and development tax credit and held that the answers could not serve as evidence. A joint note from six unions expressed deep disappointment at the suspensions and announced initiatives to protect the staff of the directorate. The reports differ on the two people's roles (two managers, or a manager and an official); their names are not published.
AI relation unknown Low reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 4 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 26/10/2026
2024RussiaUnidentified AI tools
T-Zhurnal (T-Bank's magazine) reported on 16 September 2026, in a lawyer's account of two court decisions, that the sewing company employing a Moscow resident as a full-time manager began cost-cutting in mid-2024 and introduced neural-network and AI technology, and told her that from July she would work 09:00 to 11:00, eight hours a week, with pay reduced in proportion. She refused and was dismissed for refusing to continue work after changes to her contract terms. The employer said that since it began introducing AI many of the manager's tasks were done by programs and full-time work was no longer needed, and that she had worked badly; she said the change was a disguised redundancy and that her post was to be cut and partly replaced by programs and AI. According to the article, the district court (case 2-1354/2025) found that other employees confirmed the cost-cutting and that the manager's work was planned to be fully replaced by neural networks, held that the refusal of part-time work had to be treated as a redundancy, and ordered her reinstatement with back pay and moral damages. The Moscow City Court (case 33-34099/2025) upheld the reinstatement and reduced the back-pay calculation; the court's case portal lists that appeal as concluded on 24 July 2025. The amounts are not given.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity Lawsuit Filed
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 2 sources · Added 25/10/2026
Oct 2026Event location unknownClaude (reported)
In a public post to r/jobs titled 'We were replaced with AI', created on 24 October 2026, a server and network administrator writes that they and the company's lead developer were terminated that day: their access to various systems was revoked and the chief executive then called them, with major budget cuts as the theme of the call. The poster writes that both were replaced with 'the Anthropic subscription' and, in a reply, that it is an Anthropic subscription of 180 dollars a month that the chief executive mentioned, and that staff had seen him using it to scan the company's infrastructure days earlier. In replies the poster says the company is small, located in Australia, and that they worked for it remotely, that finance staff had calls with the chief executive scheduled for the following Monday, and that they feel their years of loyalty were thrown away. The company is not named. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026
23 Jun 2025NetherlandsChatGPT
On 23 June 2025 a recruitment agency summarily dismissed a recruitment consultant it had employed since January 2024, giving seven grounds in its dismissal letter. One ground, misuse of company resources and an integrity breach, concerned questions he had put to ChatGPT on his work laptop about how to obtain a severance payment from the employer: the employer said he made defamatory statements about it there and breached his duty of confidentiality with the information he entered. He did not dispute the queries. In a decision given on 27 February 2026, the sub-district judge of the Rechtbank Zeeland-West-Brabant ruled the dismissal invalid, because the employer had not established another ground and the seven grounds formed a single composite reason. On the ChatGPT ground the judge found that private use of the laptop had not been forbidden, that he had shared only information about his employment relationship and no company secrets, and that this was culpable to a limited extent. In a final decision of 22 May 2026 the court awarded him a transition payment of 2,976.04 euros gross, fixed damages of 4,565.70 euros gross and costs, but refused the 25,000 euros of fair compensation he sought, weighing his limited income loss and his own culpable conduct, which it listed as including his sharing of information about the employment relationship. His fixed-term contract would have ended on 1 August 2025, when he started a new job.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution supported · 3 sources, 1 underlying account · Added 25/10/2026
Event date unknownEvent location unknownClaude (reported)
In a public post to r/layoffs titled 'Laid off by claude', created on 21 October 2026, a person who describes themselves in a reply as a data engineer who also did reporting, AI and frontend work writes that executives are of the opinion that Claude can manage a data warehouse, custom tooling, support tickets, servers and new product features, and that they have said the poster's whole job is redundant because AI can do it all. The poster writes that they did not have the mental capacity to argue and accepted what they call 'the MSA', and that they feel numb and are unsure whether they want to stay in the tech industry. The employer, its location and the date of the layoff are not stated. The account is the poster's alone and uncorroborated; no employer statement was retrieved, and no source describes Claude actually taking over the work.
AI relation unknown Medium reported severity
AI involvement reported · Causal attribution alleged · 1 source · Added 25/10/2026