Thank you for your service
On March 17, 2026, Sam Altman tweeted something that made my blood boil. "I have so much gratitude to people who wrote extremely complex software character-by-character. It already feels difficult to remember how much effort it really took. Thank you for getting us to this point." Thank you for your service. That's what this was. A farewell card dressed up as gratitude. A pat on the back from the guy holding the pink slip. And the internet saw right through it.
The tweet heard around the world
The backlash was immediate and brutal. "You're welcome. Nice to know that our reward is our jobs being taken away," one reply read. Another put it more bluntly: "Nothing says 'you're being replaced' quite like a heartfelt thank you from the guy doing the replacing." And they're right. This wasn't gratitude. This was a eulogy. Altman's tweet landed at a time when tech layoffs have reached staggering levels. In 2025 alone, over 245,000 tech workers lost their jobs. By April 2026, that number had already crossed 95,000, with nearly half of those cuts explicitly attributed to AI. Companies like Meta, Amazon, Snap, and Oracle have all slashed headcount while simultaneously pouring billions into AI infrastructure. Block eliminated 40% of its entire workforce. The message is clear: thank you for building the tools, now the tools will take it from here.
Create the problem, sell the solution
Here's what really gets me. These companies scraped the open web, hoovered up decades of code written by millions of developers, trained their models on it, often without consent, and now they're selling subscriptions back to those same developers so they can "stay competitive" in a market that's being eaten by the very tools built on their work. OpenAI is facing copyright lawsuits from all directions. The New York Times, Canadian news outlets, book authors, Encyclopedia Britannica, even data providers like Gracenote. The pattern is always the same: take the work, claim fair use, monetize it. OpenAI generated over $13 billion in revenue last year and was recently valued at $500 billion. That value was built on the backs of every developer, writer, and artist whose work was scraped without permission. And the solution they're selling? A $20 or $200 monthly subscription so you can use a tool trained on your own output to maybe keep your job a little longer. It's a protection racket with better branding.
The gratitude problem
Altman has a pattern of framing displacement as progress. In October 2025, he suggested that jobs eliminated by AI might not have been "real work" to begin with. In February 2026, he told an audience in New Delhi that even the CEO's job isn't safe from AI. In July 2025, he told a Federal Reserve conference that "entire job categories will disappear." Each of these statements is delivered with the same detached optimism, as if mass economic disruption is just a minor inconvenience on the way to a better future. A future that, conveniently, runs on OpenAI's infrastructure. The "thank you" tweet was just the most distilled version of this attitude. It's the tech-bro equivalent of a general thanking soldiers for their sacrifice while ordering the next wave. Thank you for your service. Now step aside.
The real cost
The numbers tell a grim story. Stack Overflow's 2025 developer survey found that 84% of developers now use AI tools in their workflow. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. BCG estimates that 50% to 55% of US jobs will be reshaped by AI in the next two to three years. But "reshaped" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. For many, "reshaped" means "eliminated." Junior developer roles are vanishing. Entry-level positions that used to be the on-ramp to a career in tech are drying up because companies can now use AI to handle the work that used to train the next generation of engineers. This isn't just about lost jobs. It's about a broken pipeline. If juniors can't get hired because AI handles their would-be tasks, who becomes the senior engineer in ten years? Who maintains the systems when the AI hallucinates something critical and there's no one left who understands the codebase line by line?
The backlash is real
The anger over Altman's tweet didn't exist in a vacuum. Tensions between AI companies and the public have been escalating. In March 2026, thousands of ChatGPT users cancelled their subscriptions after OpenAI struck a deal with the Pentagon. On April 10, 2026, a 20-year-old threw a Molotov cocktail at Altman's home and then tried to break into OpenAI's headquarters with kerosene and an anti-AI manifesto. I'm not endorsing violence. But I am saying that when you build tools that threaten people's livelihoods, scrape their work without consent, sell it back to them at a premium, and then thank them for making it all possible, you shouldn't be surprised when the response is something other than gratitude. The disconnect between Silicon Valley and the people affected by its products has never been wider. Altman lives in a world where AI is inevitable, where disruption is always net positive, where the displaced will simply "find new things to do." But for the developer who just got laid off, for the junior who can't get their foot in the door, for the artist whose style was copied without credit, "thank you for your service" doesn't sound like gratitude. It sounds like mockery.
What I actually want to see
I don't think AI should stop. I think it's one of the most powerful tools humanity has ever built. But I think the people building it owe more than a tweet to the people whose work made it possible. I want to see real compensation for training data. Not fair use arguments in court, but actual licensing deals that pay creators for their contributions. I want to see investment in retraining programs that aren't just PR stunts. I want to see tech leaders acknowledge the human cost of their products with something more substantive than a thank-you note. And most of all, I want to see honesty. Don't tell me you're grateful for my work while building a product designed to make it obsolete. Don't tell me displaced workers will find "new things to do" while your company is valued at half a trillion dollars on the back of their labour. Don't tell me this is progress when it looks an awful lot like extraction. Thank you for your service. The audacity.