Token Runner
SPRAWL // 01 / SOCIETY

SOCIETY

Labour market, copyright litigation, culture, public perception

DATA • CONVERSATIONS • SIGNALS • HUMANS • MACHINES

93,116people in layoffs attributed to AI, 2026to 14 September 2026
Society: a painting from the house’s oil series
01 /Interlinked6pieces, each an article and a film02 /Data3charts, each live from a table we hold03 /Conversations3posts this period and quoted04 /Signals25sources our pieces cite05 /Humans30people on the Replicants list

Interlinked

Society
SocietyWork

Data

Open Society in Esper →

The rows behind this figure: layoffs attributed to AI, 2026

The table is read from the same data file as the chart when this section is opened.

All Interlinked: Society

Society
SocietyWork
Economics interlinkedWork
Technology interlinkedIssues
Technology interlinkedWork
Science interlinkedIssues

Conversations

The most engaged AI posts among Society’s tracked accounts and searches since 2026-10-17: 185 posts read, 12 kept, 172 dropped as not about AI, 1 dropped as only a link. The posts are their authors’ own words; the rule under each pick says why it stands here.

The most engaged ai posts of the period

no point two accounts share this period; 12 AI posts read, the most engaged of each account shown

Why this post

the most engaged AI post of @Reuters this period (2 likes, 1 reposts, 0 quotes, 8 replies as read); from the lane

Why this post

the most engaged AI post of @azcentral this period (4 likes, 0 reposts, 0 quotes, 1 replies as read); from the lane

Why this post

the most engaged AI post of @svbizjournal this period (0 likes, 0 reposts, 0 quotes, 1 replies as read); from the lane

Signals

The filings, reports and news stories behind the Society pieces, as each piece cites them. A document two pieces cite shows twice.

  • Pew Research, 2025, as published in Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2026, figure 9.2.4: 64% of US adults and 39% of AI experts say AI will lead to fewer jobs. Values as published. the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Layoffs.fyi, the AI layoffs list: 48,716 employees in layoffs attributed to AI in the second quarter of 2026. Attributions the source records, not a count Token Runner made. the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Ipsos, 2025, as published in Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2026, figure 9.3.1: 31% in the United States trust their government to regulate AI, the lowest of the 30 countries shown. Values as published.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • SEC filings, annual reports of 70 companies with both figures in each year (of the 71 Token Runner tracks): capital spending $631.4 billion for 2025 and $431.8 billion for 2024; revenue $6,097.2 billion and $5,465.4 billion. The two percentages are arithmetic on the filed sums.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • SEC filings, cash-flow lines, 60 companies: debt raised $349.4 billion in fiscal 2025; $381.5 billion so far in fiscal 2026.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, AI Chip Owners, median estimates at 31 December 2025: 67.4% of compute held is in chips Nvidia designed; Google 24.1%, Microsoft 16.3%, Amazon 11.7%, Meta 11.0% of compute held (63.1% together, a sum of those four). the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, AI Chip Components, median estimates, 2025: Nvidia 58.5% of advanced-packaging (CoWoS) wafers.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Federal Register, Bureau of Industry and Security: 52 final export-control rules in 2024, 23 in 2025, 12 in 2026 to 24 September.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, AI chip sales, median estimates, 2025: 646,000 H100-equivalents in chips marked as made primarily for the Chinese market against 12.97 million not so marked. The table marks a chip's intended market, not where it ended up.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, Frontier AI Models: the largest training run on the list, 9.4e26 FLOP, against 5.0e25 for the largest published in 2023; 18 of 138 models from OpenAI, 16 from Google and 5 more from DeepMind.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, Notable AI Models, 2025: 30 of 107 notable models released with unrestricted open weights; the other 77 through an API, hosted, restricted or other forms.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, the data centres file: Ohio 1,457 megawatts of AI data-centre power across 7 sites, the most of any US state in the file.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • US Energy Information Administration, average residential price of electricity: Ohio 19.45 cents a kilowatt-hour in July 2026 and 12.26 in July 2020; US average in July 2026, households 18.31 cents and industry 9.77.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, AI acknowledgment in mathematics preprints: 0.4% in September 2024, 1.7% in September 2025, 38.1% in September 2026 (3,012 of 7,899).cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Epoch AI, Epoch Capabilities Index: best closed-weights model 166.82, best open-weights model 157.42.cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Associated Press (Seth Borenstein), "AI firm leaders tell UN Security Council that it could be a risk to all humanity", 23 September 2026, as carried by PBS NewsHour: the words of Dario Amodei and Sam Altman at the UN Security Council. the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Reuters, "Tech leaders, governments split over AI doom fears", 21 September 2026, as carried by BNN Bloomberg: the words of Elon Musk, Demis Hassabis and Jensen Huang (Huang to CBS News). the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • António Guterres, address to the opening of the General Debate of the 81st session of the UN General Assembly, 22 September 2026 (the words as reported by Tech Policy Press, 27 September 2026; to be confirmed on the UN text before publishing). the source ↗cited in AI: It's a F*cking Warzone Out There
  • Layoffs.fyi, the list of layoffs attributed to AI ( as Token Runner collected it on 2 October and 9 October 2026 the source ↗cited in By the People
  • OpenResearch, 'Unconditional Cash Study', the study's own page the source ↗cited in By the People
  • Fortune / The Associated Press (Kaitlyn Huamani), 'Anthropic just proposed taxing itself to pay for the jobs its AI destroys', 11 June 2026 the source ↗cited in By the People
  • BBC News (Faisal Islam), 'We'll need universal basic income - AI godfather', 18 May 2024 the source ↗cited in By the People
  • Axios, interview with Dario Amodei, 28 May 2025 the source ↗cited in By the People
  • Euronews (Pascale Davies), 'Life on Mars, honest AI, and a job-free future: Elon Musk opens up at VivaTech Q&A', 23 May 2024 the source ↗cited in By the People
  • Fortune (Mia Osmonbekov), 'A new bill would tax AI tokens to fund jobs if the technology causes mass unemployment', 1 September 2026 the source ↗cited in By the People

Humans

The people of the 2026 Replicants list who sit in Society: 30, by rank. A card opens the person on the Replicants page.

#10Lex FridmanPodcast host, Lex Fridman PodcastContent producers#37Dylan PatelFounder, chief executive and chief analyst, SemiAnalysisIndustry interlinkedContent producers#43Ben ThompsonFounder and author, StratecheryIndustry interlinkedContent producers#44Dwarkesh PatelHost, Dwarkesh PodcastContent producers#72Yannic KilcherCo-founder and chief technology officer, DeepJudge; YouTuberContent producers#75Leopold AschenbrennerAuthor of Situational Awareness; founder of Situational Awareness LPContent producers#105Kevin RooseFormer columnist at The New York TimesContent producers#106Cade MetzReporter, artificial intelligence (Science desk), The New York TimesContent producers#107Casey NewtonFounder and editor, Platformer; co-host, Machine GodsContent producers#108Amir EfratiCo-Executive Editor, The InformationContent producers#109Jessica LessinFounder and editor-in-chief, The InformationContent producers#110Mark GurmanReporter at BloombergContent producers#111Nilay PatelEditor-in-chief, The VergeContent producers#112Zvi MowshowitzWriter, Don't Worry About the VaseContent producers#113Shawn Wang (swyx)Co-founder and editor, Latent Space; founder, Smol AITechnology interlinkedContent producers#167Nathan LabenzHost, The Cognitive Revolution podcastTechnology interlinkedContent producers#168Karen HaoJournalist and authorContent producers#187Steven BartlettHost, The Diary of a CEOContent producers#188Tim ScarfeHost and CEO, Machine Learning Street TalkTechnology interlinkedContent producers#189Sarah GuoFounder, Conviction; co-host, No PriorsContent producers#190Craig S. SmithHost, Eye on AIContent producers#191Rob WiblinHost, The 80,000 Hours PodcastContent producers#192Alex KantrowitzHost, Big Technology PodcastContent producers#193Tyler CowenHolbert L. Harris Professor of Economics, George Mason University; host, Conversations with TylerContent producers#194Ezra KleinColumnist and host of The Ezra Klein Show, The New York TimesContent producers#195Sam CharringtonHost, TWIML AI PodcastTechnology interlinkedContent producers#196Dan ShipperChief executive officer, EveryContent producers#197Harry StebbingsFounder, 20VC; host, The Twenty Minute VCEconomics interlinkedContent producers#198Paul RoetzerFounder, SmarterX; co-host, The Artificial Intelligence ShowContent producers#199NLWHost, The AI Daily Brief; founder and CEO of @besuper_aiContent producers

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Machines

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