PEOPLE

EVERYTHING ABOUT A MODERN CORPORATION IS BUILT TO PREVENT ONE. The lawyers, the crisis teams, the soft passive voice of every quarterly call, a whole machine tuned so no executive ever says anything expensive in public. On 22 June, Oracle said it regardless. Not from a stage, where words get walked back by lunch, but in a federal filing.“ The adoption and deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce,” the 10-K states. With that single sentence, Oracle became the first Big Tech name to put AI on the record as the reason its people lost their jobs. The sentence has a body count. Oracle shed 21,000 people in a single year, down from 162,000 to 141,000, roughly one worker in eight. The bill for sending them home ran to US $ 1.84bn, nearly five times what it paid the year before. Nobody spends two billion dollars to make people leave on a whim. Someone at the top had decided they were no longer the plan. Larry Ellison, the company’ s Chairman and Chief Technology Officer, stands at the company’ s own developer conference and tells the room his programmers have stopped writing code.

“ The code that Oracle is writing, Oracle isn’ t writing,” he says.“ Our AI models are writing.”

82 July 2026