California launches dashboard to track AI-related unemployment claims
Following his call for policies to protect workers from job loss caused by artificial intelligence, Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Thursday that California would begin tracking AI-related unemployment claims.
The Employment Development Department and researchers at the UC California Policy Lab launched the AI-Unemployment Tracker dashboard to provide near-real time data on workers claiming unemployment insurance and whether AI played a role.
Newsom said the state tracker is the first of its kind in the nation as California companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have exploded in growth and simultaneously warned that their products could render most white-collar jobs obsolete. In May, Newsom said the U.S. needed to “democratize” the economy, warning that populist resentment towards AI would drive future elections.
This year alone, more than 121,000 tech workers have been laid off, according to a global tracker from startup founder Roger Lee. While not all of those layoffs are AI-related, behemoths like Meta, Cisco and Microsoft have laid off thousands and reassigned remaining workers to AI projects as they have staked their futures on the technology.
“We’re shaping the future — and charting the course for the nation,” Newsom said Thursday in a statement. “As AI advances, we aren’t just watching from the sidelines; we’re reimagining how we prepare California through strong governance and innovative policy.”
Researchers said in an accompanying report that while they had not yet found any evidence of mass AI-induced unemployment, their findings that white-collar, college-educated workers in tech-adjacent positions were most susceptible to displacement “should be interpreted as an early, descriptive signal of potential AI-related disruption.”
