Microsoft Lays Off 4,800 Lifelong Tech Workers, Assumes They Still Haven’t Heard of Claude

Executives were confident the people they let go would never figure out AI on their own. The plan held for most of a weekend.

REDMOND, Wash. Microsoft cut about 4,800 jobs this summer to free up money for AI, then told shareholders not to worry, because the people it let go would never figure out AI on their own.

Microsoft's memo to staff said the eliminated roles "are not being replaced by AI." Executives were just as sure the people leaving wouldn't be using it either.

According to Microsoft, every newsletter, launch and group text that mentioned Claude since 2023 went to the "Other" tab in Outlook. It's still there, unread, right next to the Teams invite for the layoffs.

"Our people have been in Outlook for decades," said a Microsoft senior vice president of Workforce Optimization, who asked not to be named because he's being optimized next week. "Statistically, they haven't gotten an email since 2014."

The backup plan: anyone who tried to look Claude up would be using Bing.

That held up for most of a weekend.

By Sunday, Dave, 44, a former Excel engineer, had sat through a mandatory Windows update, opened a Gmail account, seen Claude in the first email, and rebuilt the parts of Excel he worked on for eleven years. He also rebuilt the parts he complained about for eleven years. It's free, it opens every file Microsoft ever shipped, and it has never asked him to sign in with a Microsoft account.

"Microsoft spent billions on AI," Dave said. "I spent twenty bucks. We got the same AI."

Microsoft responded by turning on Copilot in Dave's spreadsheet. Dave doesn't know how it got there. Nobody does.

At press time Microsoft was looking at a new Microsoft 365 tier that lets former employees keep remembering how software works, $30 per user per month, renewed automatically.

Microsoft has not commented. We sent the request to their Outlook inbox.

By Brad Sebastian