Pinterest CEO fires back at workers fighting layoffs

04 Feb 2026, 19:33 · The Fresno Bee

If you have ever survived a round (or three) of layoffs at your company, you know how Pinterest employees have been feeling in recent days.

Pinterest, the image-based social media platform that lets users share and shop for their favorite consumer products, is cutting just under 15% of its workforce, citing the impact of artificial intelligence.

On Tuesday, Jan. 27, Pinterest announced plans to lay off less than 15% of its workforce of about 5,200 employees. The move will cost the company between $35 million and $45 million, according to an 8-K filing.

Although it did not project a specific amount of savings as a result of the job cuts, Pinterest says lowered long-term costs will help support its "transformation initiatives," including "reallocating resources to AI-focused roles and teams that drive AI adoption and execution, prioritizing AI-powered products and capabilities, and accelerating the transformation of its sales and go-to-market approach."

Pinterest said it plans to complete the restructuring by the end of the third quarter on Sept. 30.

Pinterest's move is AI-driven, AI-benefiting, and AI-minded - the company says investing in its headcount to support AI was responsible for a 15% year-over-year increase in non-GAAP operating expenses of $543 million. It also plans to shrink its physical footprint as part of its workforce reduction, saving money on real estate costs.

But some employees at Pinterest weren't going to take this news lying down, and they decided to do something about it.

Pinterest's headquarters in San Francisco is about to get smaller.

Photo by Justin Sullivan on Getty Images

Pinterest fires staffers tracking company layoffs

After Pinterest announced plans to lay off hundreds of employees, staffers built an internal tool to track layoffs.

CEO Bill Ready called those actions "obstructionist" in a companywide town hall meeting last week, where he revealed that those involved in building the tool had been fired.

"Healthy debate and dissent are expected, that's how we make our decisions," Ready said during the meeting, according to audio obtained by CNBC. "But there's a clear line between constructive debate and behavior that's obstructionist."

Pinterest fired those employees last Friday, Jan. 30, the company confirmed to CNBC, but it was unclear how many were let go.

Ready defended the decision at the company's all-hands meeting on Friday by saying the company was protecting confidential information about its employees.

"After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly," he said.

"This was a clear violation of Pinterest policy and of their former colleagues' privacy."

Meanwhile, Ready seemed more concerned about the "obstructionism" of keeping track of who the company is firing to replace with artificial intelligence.

"We can't tolerate from each other obstructionism, especially when we have a mission that is so meaningful but also where the odds are stacked against us," Ready said.

"We think we can beat those odds, but as a small purpose-driven player competing against the largest companies in the history of the world, the only way that we succeed is if we work together constructively, with clarity and focus."

Job cuts hit the tech sector as companies gear up for AI

Tech giant Amazon is in the midst of firing another 16,000 workers after it laid off 14,000 late last year.

Although CEO Andy Jassy recently clarified that the layoffs were financially driven, not AI-related, consternation continues to mount about the technology taking jobs.

Amazon overhired during the pandemic, and now the company says its corporate class is bloated. Meanwhile, Jassy says, "It's important to be lean. It's important to be flat."

Still, there are other tech companies for which AI is costing jobs.

Of the 244,851 global layoffs in 2025, nearly 70,000, or about 30%, were AI-related, according to Digital Journal, citing information from forex broker data firm RationalFX.

And just because Amazon says its job cuts aren't AI-related doesn't mean job cuts aren't coming to AI developers as well.

Last week, Amazon mistakenly sent a layoff notice to the Amazon Web Services cloud computing team prematurely.

The layoffs, apparently planned for the morning of Jan. 28, according to the email viewed by Reuters, are part of an initiative the company is calling "Project Dawn."

"Changes like this are hard on everyone. These decisions are difficult and are made thoughtfully as we position our organization and AWS for future success," the letter from Colleen Aubrey, senior VP of applied AI solutions at AWS, says.

TheStreet

This story was originally published February 4, 2026 at 11:33 AM.