Google has laid off employees in its Cloud division, including staff at its Threat Intelligence Group and Mandiant, the cybersecurity firm it acquired in 2022. According to a report by Business Insider, the job cuts, which have unfolded over the past two weeks, mark the latest round of layoffs in Big Tech as companies redirect resources toward artificial intelligence.
Industry-Wide Trend
The layoffs at Google follow similar moves across the tech industry. Meta cut 10% of its workforce last month, while Coinbase and Block have also used AI investments to justify job reductions earlier this year. Cybersecurity firms have not been spared: Cloudflare laid off more than 1,100 employees in May as it prepared for what executives called the "agentic AI era."
Google Layoffs: Security Teams Impacted
People familiar with the matter told Business Insider that Google's Threat Intelligence Group, one of its top security research units, was affected by this round of layoffs. The team is well-known for publishing reports on hacker activity and global cyber threats. Employees from Mandiant and other parts of Google Cloud were also impacted, with some posting about the cuts on LinkedIn.
What Google Said About the Layoffs
A Google spokesperson said: "We regularly evaluate our internal structures to ensure we are best positioned to meet the evolving demands of our customers and the industry." One person familiar with the decision added that Google cited the need to reinvest in growth areas such as AI development as justification for the move.
Google AI CEO's Perspective
Recently, Google AI CEO Demis Hassabis revealed that he thinks the companies cutting engineers to ride the AI wave have got it backwards. The Google DeepMind CEO told WIRED that when developers become three or four times more productive, the smart move is to do three or four times more work, not march people out the door. To him, treating AI gains as a reason to shrink headcount is a failure of nerve dressed up as strategy.
He made clear he would happily take the talent everyone else is shedding. "I have a million ideas, from lab drug discovery to game design," he said. "I'd love to have some free engineers to go and do those kinds of things." His pitch arrives in the middle of a brutal stretch for tech workers, with 2026 layoffs already past 142,000 and the cuts still coming.
