Block's announcement established a template that critics are now treating as a warning: a CEO publicly attributes mass layoffs to AI productivity gains, bypassing the harder-to-defend explanations — cost pressure, revenue shortfalls, investor expectations. Dorsey's own account of his thought process described working out the 'minimal number of people' needed to run a $41 billion company, which frames the 4,000 departures as an optimization exercise rather than a business failure. That framing is precisely what the AI-washing critique targets: when AI becomes the named cause, scrutiny shifts from business fundamentals…