Dashboard Tracks AI Job Cuts and Wage Losses Across US States

The Wage Loss Dashboard includes a map of layoffs since January 2026, updated this month to include September data, and a drop-down that displays figures for the entire country or an individual state. It estimates annual wage loss by multiplying AI-attributed job cuts by the average annual salary. According to CAIS, the wage estimates “begin to show what those cuts can mean for households and local economies.”

Nationally, the dashboard puts the estimated average wage loss at $25 per person per year, a figure it presents relative to everyday expenses such as a tank of gas. California shows $56 per person, reflecting just over 27,000 layoffs attributed to AI. Alaska shows $14 per person, with 138 job losses. CAIS cautions that these state figures are not observed AI layoffs. It applies each month’s national share of cuts citing AI to a state’s announced job cuts.

The dashboard draws on monthly reporting from Challenger, Gray and Christmas, which compiles layoff announcements across the U.S. by state and national job cuts credited to AI; Bureau of Labor Statistics data on each state’s annual mean wage; and U.S. Census Bureau population estimates. In 2025, Challenger, Gray and Christmas identified more than 54,000 job cuts that companies publicly linked to AI, equal to one in 20 layoffs from last year.

CAIS wrote that while there has been significant news coverage of AI-related job loss, it can be hard to quantify how those cuts affect the average person’s finances. The dashboard, it said, aims to illuminate the monetary costs of AI on American families and communities. The project’s researchers wrote that one person’s layoff means less income for every business they support, and that multiplying that effect across thousands of workers in multiple industries reveals the economic weight of AI displacement. They added that AI-attributed job cuts are not spread evenly, with states that have large tech and media sectors experiencing greater impact.

CAIS also noted limitations. The dashboard does not include jobs created by AI, productivity gains, re-employment, or secondary economic effects. Part of the reason is that experts do not have a consensus on whether or how much AI will stimulate the economy or outpace job displacement. AI-attributed layoffs themselves are murky: the data cover cuts that companies themselves said were tied to AI. Without a single definition of what that means or complete transparency from companies, it is not always possible to prove that a layoff was directly caused by AI-driven obsolescence or replacement.

The Alliance for Secure AI, which runs another tracker called Jobloss.ai, described its methodology this way: “We don’t require an executive to say ‘we replaced a team with AI.’ This is a moderate standard, deliberately: it captures the broad pattern of AI-justified workforce reductions while excluding clearly unrelated cuts.” Jobloss.ai catalogues job loss data by company, date, and how explicitly companies cited AI around those layoffs, though the difficulty of tracking such data means it logs only layoffs that meet certain criteria.

Editor's Summary

The Center for AI Safety's Wage Loss Dashboard estimates that more than 117,000 AI-attributed U.S. job cuts in 2026 amount to about $8.5 billion in annual wage losses, with California hit hardest on a per-person basis. The tool relies on company-reported links to AI and excludes new AI-created jobs, productivity gains, re-employment, and secondary economic effects. It offers a state-by-state view of how cuts that companies attribute to AI may affect household finances and local economies.