Tech layoffs: High-growth startups are shedding jobs... again

6/9/22 8:00PM

Tech startups are cutting back‍

‍Bird, the company most famous for its electric scooters and bikes, is laying off 23% of its workforce this week according to an internal memo. With 572 employees as of the end of 2021, that suggests around 130 jobs are being cut, as the company cited macroeconomic trends and a need to reduce its cost base.

Although notable, Bird is only the latest in a long list of tech layoffs. The site Layoffs.fyi has been tracking tech startup job losses since the pandemic started, and it's starting to show a marked increase in layoffs in the last few months. In May the site tracked 16,935 jobs lost, the highest monthly reading for 24 months, only behind the ~26,000 tech startup jobs that were lost during the early months of the pandemic.

‍Funding doesn't grow on trees

‍Falling share prices can sometimes feel like an abstraction, only affecting the paper wealth of shareholders. But the tech sell-off that we've discussed at length this year was always going to filter through into real economic decisions. Startups burning cash to chase growth have been in vogue — now they couldn't be further from it. Business models that promised much once they got to a certain scale now just don't have the time to get there — and the record venture funding that was happy to bankroll that expansion has evaporated. Layoffs, unfortunately, could continue.

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Prediction markets have, predictably, been given a boost by the summer of sports

Major platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket have seen huge upticks in users of late, thanks in no small part to what’s felt like a recent sporting smorgasbord, with major competitions across hockey, basketball, and soccer soaking up fans’ time (and spending, clearly) at the outset of summer.

While gaming industry groups may not like it, there’s been a huge change in the methods people are using to put money on the big games, with everyone from fortunate NYC bar owners, to a far less fortunate Spanish supporter, turning to prediction markets to try and turn their sports know-how into cold, hard cash.

According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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According to a new report from Adam Blacker for apptopia, that shift might have been even more seismic than imagined in the wake of the NBA and NHL finals and around the 2026 World Cup kicking off.

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Anthropic pulls Fable and Mythos access worldwide after Trump administration bars their use by foreign nationals

Only days after releasing two versions of its next-gen AI model, Anthropic has disabled them for users worldwide.

Anthropic says it received a Friday night order from the Trump administration to suspend access to the models for any foreign national (anywhere in the world) — a group that included some Anthropic employees. In response, the company turned off access to everyone.

Last week, the company released to the public its much-anticipated Claude Fable 5 model (and its restricted version Claude Mythos 5, which is still being tested with trusted partners). Anthropic said in a blog post announcing the action that officials cited national security concerns with the new models, while offering few specific details.

The post said that the government gave the company “verbal evidence of a potential narrow, non-universal jailbreak” of the public Fable 5 model. A jailbreak is a means by which users can evade restrictions built into the code to unlock prohibited functionality. Anthropic downplayed the significance of the attack, and said other major models, such as OpenAI’s GPT-5.5, could also be affected by the technique described.

Fears of these first Mythos-class models being misused are running high, after Anthropic warned the cybersecurity world in May that the advanced cyber capabilities of Mythos have rapidly discovered thousands of vulnerabilities in ubiquitous software, leading to the decision to restrict the full version of the model to a close group of trusted partners for testing.

This morning, Axios reported that Anthropic technical staff have flown to Washington to meet with White House officials to resolve the issue.

The Wall Street Journal is reporting that the Trump administration’s decision to take action against Anthropic was prompted by discussions that Amazon CEO Andy Jassy had with officials, including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. According to the report, Amazon researchers said they had been able to evade some of Fable 5’s security restrictions using specific prompts. Amazon is a major investor in Anthropic.

Anthropic is currently suing the US government to fight the Pentagon’s blacklisting of the company on national security grounds.

Statement on the US government directive to suspend access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5