Is AI Actually Firing You? California Finally Built a Tracker to Find Out
Finally, someone stopped doom-scrolling and started measuring. California launched the CAIT, a new tool to see if OpenAI and Anthropic are actually eating jobs or if we’re all just collectively hallucinating the apocalypse.
The California AI-Unemployment Tracker (CAIT) pulls together unemployment benefit claims and cross-references them with industry exposure metrics provided by OpenAI and Anthropic. By analyzing data from the California Employment Development Department (EDD) and the California Policy Lab at UCLA, the state is trying to spot shifts in the labor market before they turn into full-blown crises.
The first batch of data covering May 2026 suggests that mass job losses haven't arrived yet. Instead, the tracker reveals that unemployment is creeping up specifically among high-educated professionals, including those with master's and doctoral degrees. It seems the AI revolution is currently being very polite to blue-collar workers while aggressively auditing the office elite.
Geographically, the pain is concentrated in the San Francisco Bay Area, hitting tech services harder than the rest of the state. While the system is designed as an early warning for officials to pivot funding toward retraining, it remains notoriously difficult to prove that AI was the primary culprit behind any single pink slip rather than the usual corporate restructuring.
The data is still a blunt instrument that ignores the massive shadow economy of freelancers and contractors who don't qualify for state benefits. Relying on government paperwork to measure a technological disruption is like trying to monitor a wildfire with a thermometer that only checks the weather once a month. Either way, the experiment proves that the anxiety over automation is now officially a matter of public record.
Source: California Policy Lab
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