The Sydney Morning Herald ran with this headline today: "'I am deeply sorry': Australian software giant Atlassian to cut 1600 workers, blaming AI."
Atlassian's actual framing — laid out in Mike Cannon-Brookes's memo to staff and the accompanying SEC filing — is that the company is cutting 1,600 roles (roughly 10% of its workforce) to self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales, while strengthening its financial profile. In other words, "we are moving budget from headcount to R&D and acquisitions". Cannon-Brookes explicitly addressed this, writing that Atlassian's approach "is not 'AI replaces people'" but that it would be "disingenuous to pretend AI doesn't change the mix of skills we need."
At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, two senior executives told Reuters that AI would be used as an excuse by companies that were already planning layoffs anyway; separately, Deutsche Bank analysts warned CNBC that "AI redundancy washing will be a significant feature of 2026," and Randstad's CEO — running the world's largest staffing firm — argued that those 50,000 job losses being attributed to AI were really driven by general market uncertainty.
And on the question of whether financial pressure was the more honest explanation: The Motley Fool called this a week ago, publishing on March 4 that Atlassian's stock had fallen 36% in February alone and predicting the company "may need to rein in its expenses, and that could mean layoffs." Atlassian's stock rose 2–4% in after-hours trading on the layoff news, which lines up nicely with investors rewarding perceived cost discipline, not an AI pivot.
Kudos to the outlets that managed more accurate headlines on the same story. CNBC, Bloomberg, The Nightly , The Register, Startup Daily, SmartCompany - and I'm sure others I missed.