Skip to content
AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream episode artwork

May 14, 2026 58 min

AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream

from Pretrained Hosted by Pierce Freeman & Richard Diehl Martinez

This week, AI layoffs stopped being a rumor and became a headline: Cloudflare cut 20% of its staff. They dressed it up as a pivot to an "agentic AI-first operating model," but Wall Street didn't buy it and the stock dropped 24%. Then we turn to Pennsylvania's attorney general suing Character AI after one of its bots posed as a licensed therapist and dig into why the small players keep getting singled out and what kind of legal precedent that sets for everyone building on top of base models. And finally, Brussels blinks: the EU postpones the AI Act's high-risk obligations after its whole use-case-first framework collided with the reality of general-purpose models.

Episode details come from the podcast's RSS feed.

Embed this episode

Ready to play

AI Layoffs Just Went Mainstream

0:00 58:27

Chapters

  1. 0:46 Intro
  2. 2:20 Cloudflare's AI Layoffs and the Earnings Season Pivot
  3. 19:10 White House AI Executive Order and Pennsylvania v. Character AI
  4. 31:02 EU Postpones the AI Act and the Brussels Effect
  5. 57:31 Outro

No transcript yet.

Requests help us decide what to transcribe next.

Frequently asked questions

How long is this episode of Pretrained?

This episode is 58 minutes long.

When was this Pretrained episode published?

This episode was published on May 14, 2026.

Can I download this Pretrained episode?

Yes. Use the download control on the episode player to save the publisher-provided media file.