What is the AI Layoff Tracker?

A free, continuously updated layoff tracker covering verified job cuts worldwide across all industries and causes. It flags which layoffs companies explicitly attribute to AI or automation. Every entry links to a primary source: a SEC 8-K filing, a US state WARN notice, or a named news outlet with the exact quote.

How many layoffs have there been in 2026 so far?

So far in 2026 the tracker holds 3,290 verified layoff events totaling 808,954 job cuts worldwide. Companies explicitly blamed AI for 99,935 of those cuts. Totals update daily as new filings and reports are verified.

Where does the layoff data come from?

Four kinds of sources. SEC 8-K filings, searched twice daily. Official WARN notices from 49 US states, imported daily with no AI processing. The European Restructuring Monitor, which is Eurofound's official per-company database of announced restructuring across the EU27, Norway and historically the UK (imported daily and credited to Eurofound; because these are announcement-stage figures, they feed the separately labeled "Announced" tier and never the verified totals). And worldwide press coverage in 65+ languages through the GDELT news index plus NewsAPI. The dataset spans 2015 to the present across 49 countries, 69,579 events in total.

What sources do you use?

Official government filings and legally required notices first: every SEC 8-K/6-K filing, official WARN mass-layoff notices from 49 US states (each a live link on our Data Sources page), and the EU's Eurofound restructuring monitor. Worldwide, we add named news coverage in 65+ languages from an editorially maintained trusted-outlet allowlist. Nothing is estimated — every number links back to one of these. The Data Sources page lists each one, with links to check the raw source yourself.

How is this different from other layoff trackers?

Announcement surveys count corporate intentions on the day of the announcement. This job layoff tracker counts what has a verifiable document or quoted primary source behind it, so it is a documented floor rather than an estimate. Announcement-stage cuts are also tracked, but in a separately labeled tier that is never mixed into the verified totals.

Can journalists and researchers use this data?

Yes, free with attribution to asktherecruiter.com (CC BY 4.0). Filtered or full CSV and JSON downloads are on the page, and a public REST API serves the same data. Corrected entries are publicly flagged, and every correction to published figures is disclosed in the on-page corrections log.

How often is the tracker updated?

Continuously. News and SEC filings are collected twice daily (morning and after US market close, ET); official WARN notices and Eurofound ERM records import daily; and the daily summary, stats, charts and table read live data on every page load. The Tracker Health page shows every collector's latest run in real time.

What is the difference between "verified" and "announced" job cuts?

Verified cuts have a filing or independently reported source behind them: a WARN notice, an SEC filing, or a named outlet's report of cuts taking place. Announced cuts are company plans reported at announcement stage, tracked in their own labeled tier and never mixed into the verified totals, because announced plans can shrink, stretch over years, or partially happen through attrition.

How do I report an error?

Use the contact page and corrections get priority. Every entry links to its primary source, so you can check any number against the underlying document.

AskTheRecruiter · public operations

AI Tracker Health

Name: AI Layoff Tracker
Creator: AskTheRecruiter
License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Live collector health, evidence integrity, coverage limits and active quality work. A degraded source is a visible gap—not a zero result.

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Operator actions — needs a human, once

Search Console: submit /blog/company-layoffs-sitemap.xml.
Denmark Jobindsats key: send the drafted application (docs/outreach/); store as JOBINDSATS_API_KEY_DK.
Quebec MESS courtesy notice: send the drafted email; collector is pre-built.
CourtListener token: free signup; store as COURTLISTENER_API_KEY.
Aggregator lead-access emails: send the drafted aggregator permission requests (docs/outreach/aggregator-lead-access.md) — unlocks automated daily lead checks; until a yes, aggregator monitoring stays manual by policy.

Operate — for maintainers & agents

GitHub Actions — every scheduled job, manual dispatches, full run logs.
Continuation brief — the complete state of the programme for any new agent or maintainer.
Coverage gap-closure plan — the ranked path to fuller coverage, with executed items marked.
quality-status · integrity-status — machine-readable state for automation.

Product roadmap

Features list

Released capabilities and their rollout state. Live collector status and errors are shown above; this list does not imply complete country coverage.

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Source-linked event records

Published events keep cited filings, government notices, company statements or named reports; canonical records can retain several reports.

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Evidence-aware AI classification

AI-primary, contributing, context and denial are kept separate. Model extraction assists; source quotes and deterministic checks decide publication.

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Deduplication and lifecycle review

Cross-outlet reports are merged into source-preserving canonical events. Possible announcement-to-execution matches enter a read-only editorial queue.

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Public data and audit tools

Filters, exports, record sources, corrections, release ledger, integrity, quality and source-health endpoints are publicly available.

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Collector-run ledger

Source attempts, raw candidate volumes and visible degraded states are retained from this release onward; no legacy run history is guessed.

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Dataset releases and change report

Each deployment snapshots the public dataset; this page reports the retained ledger window and disclosed recent corrections, removals, merges and coverage status.

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US announcement reconciliation (internal)

A monthly, like-for-like US employer / announcement / AI-primary reconciliation is computed internally to monitor coverage; tracker totals are never changed to match it.

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High-impact editorial review

Very large, AI-primary and multi-country events are surfaced for source-based review; nothing is silently auto-corrected.

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Durable evidence hashes

Every retained excerpt is hashed: new excerpts at write time, and the legacy backlog completed its bounded backfill on July 18, 2026. Any newly pending hashes are reported live above.

In progress

Announcement-date and employer-domicile enrichment

Employer-domicile shipped July 19, 2026: a curated, source-verifiable HQ registry powers the US-employer basis views. Daily evidence-only announcement-date enrichment continues; unknown fields remain blank rather than inferred.

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Measured country recall

The first published sample: California WARN, June 2026 — 11 of 12 independently transcribed official notices matched a canonical tracker event (91.7% sample recall), measured through a three-actor review chain against a sealed official document. A sample is a spot measurement, never a completeness claim; further country-period samples follow the same protocol.

Pending review

Official national and company IR connectors

The first five reviewed company-owned IR feeds (Intel, SAP, Cisco, Salesforce, Micron) were admitted to the versioned registry on July 18, 2026. Japan EDINET and South Korea OpenDART discovery probes now run on the twice-daily schedule and report health above — they list official filings only and ingest nothing. A country is claimed covered only after an evidence-gated extraction connector passes review.

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Embeddable US widgets

A noindex, source-linked US national/state iframe widget links readers to its exact filtered tracker view. Build copyable code on the publisher tools page; metro variants remain deliberately out of scope.

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Company layoff directory

Pages live at /company-layoffs/ and grow automatically: a weekly autopilot admits companies with three or more source-linked canonical events and a clean identity, validated by the same server rules as manual review. Indexable pages are listed in the sitemap; below-threshold pages stay noindex.

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Quarterly State of Layoffs report

The query-backed HTML report is published from an immutable server-generated snapshot, with its data revision and coverage limits disclosed.

In progress

WARN transparency dataset

The separate evidence-linked research foundation is ready. It will not label an employer non-compliant without verified notice, timing and adjudication evidence.

Collector operations

Last completed source attempt. Counts are raw candidate documents, not a claim of accepted events.

Source	Coverage target	Cadence	Last pull	Result	Status / safe detail

Recent collector runs

Append-only history from this health-ledger release onward. It records source attempts and raw candidates—not accepted events—and never reconstructs earlier runs.

Window

When	Source	Status	Raw candidates	Safe detail

Current work

Actionable backlogs

Schedule and coverage

Railway, twice daily: SEC EDGAR (United States), NewsAPI and global GDELT (worldwide news), reviewed company IR feeds, plus Japan EDINET and South Korea OpenDART discovery probes (official filing lists only — nothing is ingested or classified from them).
GitHub Actions, daily: US WARN and Eurofound ERM (European Union) at 13:00 UTC; dedupe, quality, evidence-hash and bounded enrichment/recovery jobs.
Monthly: strict US announcement reconciliation (internal coverage check). A red threshold is a coverage alert, not a data-ingest crash.
Discovery only: the Japan and South Korea probes report their run health above but are not a coverage claim; an evidence-gated extraction connector must pass review first. United Kingdom Companies House access is identity-support only.

Collector-run telemetry begins with plugin 2.18.21; legacy daily pull counts are not reconstructed or guessed.

Rolling dataset change report

Snapshot totals begin at ledger inception. Net change is not labelled as gross additions, because merges, corrections and removals can change the total.

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Machine-readable: quality · integrity · source health · collector runs · release ledger