New California study finds highly educated workers most harmed by AI

A first-of-its-kind report came out last week, a month after Gov. Gavin Newsom mandated the state document how hard Californians have been hit by artificial intelligence-related layoffs. The new report, published Wednesday by the California Policy Lab, reveals data on layoffs that have taken place across the state since the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 in November 2022. Since that innovation from OpenAI, more than a third of U.S. workers have integrated AI tools into their workflows, leading to concerns about the prospect of more layoffs as needs within the workforce continue to rapidly change. The researchers looked at unemployment claims, combined with AI-exposure in claimants’ jobs up until May of this year, and found that since the creation of the popular chat tool, a higher rate of job losses have come out of the San Francisco Bay Area compared with the rest of California. The report also found that workers who are losing their jobs are not early career; contrary to popular belief, workers who are more educated –– specifically those with bachelor’s degrees and higher –– are filing an increased number of unemployment claims. “This is the first data set that shows it’s not just early-career people,” researcher Till von Wachter, the director of the lab at UCLA, told SFGATE in a phone call. “It’s people who are established employees. They are highly educated and concentrated in the Bay Area.” In May 2026, there were about 4,000 more new unemployment claims from high-AI-exposure workers with bachelor’s or advanced degrees than in November 2022, von Wachter said. That equates to a 20% increase. There were about 1,700 more high-AI-exposure claims for someone with a bachelor’s, and 2,260 more for those with a master’s. There was no evidence, von Wachter said, of a larger statewide surge in layoffs among workers. Instead, there has been a steady increase, rather than a sudden uptick, of job loss across the state since 2022. The most dramatic spike came directly from the Bay Area. This might not come as a surprise as layoffs become commonplace in Silicon Valley. Newsom issued his executive order in May, the same week that Meta laid off 2,000 workers from its Menlo Park location, saying he was concerned by the number of people losing their jobs in California, and declared that the state “must think bigger” on the issue. Rivian, the car company, laid off hundreds of workers in June, and Oracle recently announced that it has cut 21,000 jobs total as a result of AI developments this year alone. Salesforce has made cuts, as well as Elastic, another SF-based AI company, among others. Von Wachter called California “ground zero” of artificial intelligence development and, consequently, layoffs. There are still limitations to the data, he said. For instance, they don’t have the ability to measure the number of workers that actively use AI in their day-to-day jobs. “We neither know which companies have invested in AI, nor what tools workers use in their job, nor what occupations they have while they are employed,” he said in an email. “We only know what occupations they had when they filed for unemployment benefits. Of course, companies themselves know, but this data is not available to researchers.” These findings might come as a surprise, as younger, early-career workers are believed to be the most at-risk of losing their jobs, but the report almost entirely leaves out that demographic. Von Wachter told SFGATE that early-career workers are largely missing from the data they collect because younger people don’t tend to file for unemployment. He attributed that to a few factors, specifically citing that often those workers don’t know that they qualify for unemployment benefits, so they never apply. Newsom’s order focuses on getting ahead of a total eradication of jobs that are replaced by AI. Researchers will continue to proactively track layoffs in almost real-time to provide lawmakers and the public with a clearer sense of the ramifications of artificial intelligence on the workforce. In the coming months, Newsom said he also wants to create AI-specific frameworks around labor. Travel | Over 100 passengers fall ill with virus on cruise to SFFood | Trump administration brings lawsuit against 99 RanchCrime | Youth pastor accused of pushing wife off Zion cliff found deadNews | Historic San Francisco earthquake home to be demolished Get SFGATE's top stories straight to your inbox by signing up for The Daily newsletter.