July 11, 2026

Meituan Confirmed 2,000 Cuts, and Its Workers Call AI "the Replacement"

China's biggest food-delivery platform confirms its largest workforce reduction in years, OpenText takes its fourth round of AI-first cuts in 20 months, and Ubisoft disbanded the Barcelona team days after they shipped a critically acclaimed Assassin's Creed remake.

July 2026 so far (through July 11), newly announced cuts with disclosed numbers: about 9,500 people across 10 companies. Microsoft (4,800, July 6), Allianz Partners (up to 1,800, July 8, insurance not tech), Meituan (fewer than 2,000, confirmed July 10), OpenText (~400, July 8), Mews (~200, July 7), Starling Bank (~130, July 8), Bragg Gaming (~95, July 9), Darrow (60, July 7), Ubisoft Barcelona (51, July 9), and Yield Guild Games (35, July 6). Plus undisclosed cuts at Sonos (3%), Trust & Will, and Inductiva (~80% of a small team). Two WARN filings for May-announced cuts take effect this coming Monday: LinkedIn (606, California) and Cisco (471, California). For running macro context, tech employers announced 139,156 U.S. job cuts through the first half of 2026, up 83% year over year, per Challenger, Gray & Christmas, with AI cited in 101,743 of those cuts.

Meituan: fewer than 2,000 gone, and the internal word for AI is "the replacement"

Meituan, China's largest food-delivery and local-services platform, confirmed to Caixin on July 10 that it has laid off fewer than 2,000 employees over the past two months. Several employees told the publication the cuts began in early May and span multiple business lines, including core departments: in-store group buying, Meituan Shangou (its instant-retail arm), and commercialization. One employee said their non-core team lost 20% of staff while 60% were transferred to other departments.

The company framed the departures as a small share of its 110,000-person workforce. Employees called it Meituan's largest personnel adjustment in recent years. Severance is N+1 (one month's pay per year of service plus one month), per Caixin.

The stated reason is organizational streamlining after a costly instant-retail price war. Meituan has been fighting Alibaba's Ele.me, JD.com, and ByteDance's Douyin for dominance in rapid grocery delivery, a fight that burned margins through subsidies and rider incentives. But the plausible real mechanism is twofold: the price war exhausted the budget for non-core roles, and AI is now absorbing the back-office work those roles did. Workers told Singapore Informer in late June that colleagues had started calling the company's AI systems "the replacement" internally, and that "optimised" had become shorthand for layoffs framed as performance improvements. The South China Morning Post reported that Xiaomi, Baidu, and Meituan have all trimmed teams under the banner of "AI optimization," a term workers view as a veiled description of job cuts.

The pattern mirrors what Allianz Partners' CEO said outright last week, when she named AI as the reason for up to 1,800 call-centre cuts. The difference is that Chinese companies still use the euphemism "optimization" where European and American executives are starting to name AI directly. Even as it cuts, Meituan is still recruiting technology talent for large language model research, autonomous driving, and drone technology through its Beidou Program, per Shuzi Qushi, cutting in the non-core departments where AI has taken hold while hiring in the departments where it has not.

OpenText: fourth round of cuts in 20 months, and AI is the stated priority

OpenText, the Kitchener-Waterloo-based enterprise information management company, confirmed to BetaKit on July 8 that it has laid off 2% of its global workforce, roughly 400 employees out of more than 20,000. A spokesperson called it "ongoing organizational planning."

This is the fourth round in a serial pattern. OpenText cut 1,200 jobs in 2024, another 1,600 in May 2025, roughly 880 in March 2026, and now approximately 400 more. The company is executing a three-year "business optimization plan" that has included selling non-core businesses to pay down debt. The previous CEO, Mark Barrenechea, told employees that embracing AI was a "number one priority and baseline expectation." New CEO Ayman Antoun took over in April. The stock is down roughly 25% from a year ago.

The stated reason is organizational planning. The real mechanism is a publicly stated AI-first strategy paired with debt management: the company has been cutting human roles and directing investment toward AI and cloud security, while selling assets to deleverage. A source affected by the March cuts told BetaKit that "the amount of knowledge loss is unbelievable." The company said Canadian impact this round was "minimal" and that its Canadian headcount has grown 6% over the past year, even as it shed roles in the United States and India.

Ubisoft Barcelona: shipped a hit, then got disbanded

Ubisoft laid off 51 employees at its Barcelona studio, days after that team shipped Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced to the strongest reviews and biggest Steam launch in the franchise in over a decade, an 84 on Metacritic. The cuts were first proposed on June 10 and confirmed on July 9, the game's release day.

The Barcelona team had raised concerns as early as summer 2025 that it was not being assigned a next project, which at Ubisoft typically happens up to a year before a current project ships. Vantage Studios, the Tencent-backed entity now overseeing Ubisoft's biggest franchises, told the studio there would be no further mandates, despite the team proposing new Assassin's Creed projects. The studio will now focus exclusively on Rainbow Six.

QA lead Isabel Codina García, who spent seven years at the studio, wrote on LinkedIn: "Today is a bittersweet day. Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced releases today, the project I have been working on for the past 2.5 years. However, two weeks before launch, the whole AC team at Ubisoft Barcelona was informed of a collective redundancy plan." She added: "After 7 years at Ubisoft Barcelona, this is not how I imagined it would end."

The cuts are part of Ubisoft's broader 200 million euro cost-reduction plan, which has already closed studios in Winnipeg, Belgrade, and Stockholm and cancelled three new IPs plus the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time remake. Staff at Barcelona staged strikes through the Spanish union CGT, demanding a five-year guarantee against further collective layoffs and protection for the 51 roles. The launch celebration was reportedly downgraded from a full event to a small in-office gathering.

The mechanism here is not AI. It is a publisher in financial distress ring-fencing its most valuable IPs inside a Tencent-backed subsidiary while support studios absorb the cuts. Success on the project did not protect the team because the decision was made before the game shipped.

Briefs

LinkedIn and Cisco WARN filings take effect Monday. Two California WARN filings for cuts announced in May become effective July 13. LinkedIn is cutting 606 jobs across Mountain View (352), San Francisco (108), Sunnyvale (59), Carpinteria (21), and 66 remote California workers, with engineering roles hit hardest. CEO Daniel Shapero announced the restructuring in a May 13 memo, framing it as scaling back investments to "operate more profitably" while internal memos pointed to AI integration. Cisco is cutting 471 California jobs (236 San Jose, 154 Milpitas, 81 San Francisco), also effective July 13, part of the roughly 4,000 cuts first announced in May. Neither is a new announcement, but both take effect this coming Monday.

Xbox "Save Our Devs" march is Tuesday. The OneBGS union rally covered yesterday is still set for July 15 across Rockville, Austin, Dallas, and Montreal. No new developments since the announcement. The 440 union positions cut in the Xbox reset remain the focal point, and the march will be the first organized labor action against the restructuring since it was announced on July 6.

Red Rover Interactive: 22 roles. The Enginefall developer, covered earlier this month when the cuts were first reported without a number, is now said to be cutting 22 roles as development stretches past its original timeline, per a LinkedIn post from CEO Fred Richardson reported by Full Effect Back. The Oslo and Newcastle studio raised roughly 20 million dollars led by Krafton.

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