In 2025, New York State updated its Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification Act to require companies to disclose AI's role in mass layoffs, becoming the first US jurisdiction to mandate such reporting. After nearly a year of operation, the results are in.1 Zero of 162 companies filing layoff notices attributed cuts to AI or technological automation. Those filings covered more than 28,300 workers, including staff at Amazon and Goldman Sachs.
Non-compliance currently carries a penalty of $500 per day. Proposed legislation would raise that to $10,000 per violation and strip companies of state grants and tax incentives for five years. That tougher bill has not advanced.
Silence on this scale is evidence, not absence. Harvard Business Review reported that only 2% of layoffs followed actual AI deployment. Oxford Economics called AI's layoff role "overstated". Both relied on corporate claims taken at face value. New York's data shows those claims are legally shielded as well as reputationally incentivised. Companies that cut 28,300 jobs had the opportunity and the obligation to say whether AI played a role. Every one said no. Either AI genuinely drives none of the displacement in the nation's financial capital, or the disclosure framework is failing.
