--- title: Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, AI token costs hit... description: Verizon is laying off 3,000 retail workers and franchising 274 stores, with its CEO explicitly citing AI as the replacement for customer service work. AI token... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/verizon-cuts-3-000-retail-jobs-ai-token-costs-hit-salary-level-spend-gw7irohy1 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, AI token costs hit salary-level spend | daily.dev og:description: Verizon is laying off 3,000 retail workers and franchising 274 stores, with its CEO explicitly citing AI as the replacement for customer service work. AI token... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/verizon-cuts-3-000-retail-jobs-ai-token-costs-hit-salary-level-spend-gw7irohy1 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/Gw7IrOHY1.png og:image:alt: Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, AI token costs hit salary-level spend og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, AI token costs hit salary-level spend **[Career Digest](https://daily.dev/sources/career_digest)** · 5 min read · 8 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Verizon is laying off 3,000 retail workers and franchising 274 stores, with its CEO explicitly citing AI as the replacement for customer service work. AI token costs are now a serious budget line: the top 1% of AI-adopting companies are burning through $90,000/year in tokens, and Uber burned through its entire AI coding budget by April. Anaconda acquired Kilo Code — an open-source AI coding agent with 3 million users — to build a governed, model-neutral enterprise AI stack. Meanwhile, the open-source AI regulation fight is heating up, with Anthropic's CEO reportedly preparing to testify before Congress about open-weight model risks while the developer community pushes back hard. ## Content **TLDR:** Verizon is laying off 3,000 retail workers and franchising 274 stores, with its CEO explicitly citing AI as the replacement for customer service work. AI token costs are now a serious budget line: the top 1% of AI-adopting companies are burning through $90,000/year in tokens, and Uber burned through its entire AI coding budget by April. Anaconda acquired Kilo Code — an open-source AI coding agent with 3 million users — to build a governed, model-neutral enterprise AI stack. Meanwhile, the open-source AI regulation fight is heating up, with Anthropic's CEO reportedly preparing to testify before Congress about open-weight model risks while the developer community pushes back hard. --- ## Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, explicitly cites AI replacing customer service Verizon is eliminating roughly 3,000 retail store employees and transferring 274 corporate locations to franchise operators, effective August 16. CEO Dan Schulman has cited AI as a direct replacement for a large share of customer service work, claiming Verizon's AI systems already outperform human agents on satisfaction scores. Critics note that in-store tasks like device trade-ins still require humans, meaning jobs are largely moving off Verizon's balance sheet rather than disappearing entirely — but the direction is clear. This follows the elimination of 13,000 nonunion positions in November 2025. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/qDJLaaDNL) ## AI token costs are approaching developer salary levels, and most teams are flying blind The top 1% of AI-adopting companies were burning $90,000/year on tokens as of May 2026, growing at 14.1% monthly — on a trajectory to cross the average $192K software engineer salary before year-end. Uber burned through its entire AI coding budget by April. Meta shut down an internal token spend leaderboard after costs approached billions. Microsoft cancelled Claude Code licenses and pushed engineers onto Copilot CLI. The core problem: agentic workflows multiply costs in ways single-task benchmarks don't capture, and real invoices run 7–11x higher than naive estimates. Engineering teams are responding with compression tooling, smarter context injection, and multi-model routing — but most organizations still have no visibility into what they're actually spending. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=gwa82lqJn&id=gwWnoN5Dm&id=eo37Uirwp) ## Anaconda acquires Kilo Code to build a model-neutral enterprise AI coding stack Anaconda acquired Kilo Code, an open-source AI coding agent that went from zero to 3 million users in 16 months and now processes nearly 10 trillion tokens a month across 500+ models from 60+ providers. The strategic logic: Anaconda already serves 95% of the Fortune 500 through package management, but the developer relationship has migrated to whoever owns the daily coding tool. Kilo's model-neutral architecture — route any task to any provider, switch freely — directly addresses the enterprise pain of either being locked into one AI vendor or having zero visibility into what developers are using. Early customers report 30–50% reductions in token consumption through intelligent routing. This is Anaconda's second acquisition recently, having also bought Outerbounds (Metaflow) to cover production orchestration. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/iTa3dgq41) ## Open-source AI regulation fight breaks into the open Rumors that the US government may move to restrict open-source AI models are circulating, with Anthropic's CEO reportedly preparing to testify before Congress about the dangers of open-weight models. The developer community's response has been fast and pointed: Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue called restrictions counterproductive and is organizing a march in San Francisco, while Box CEO Aaron Levie argued that China is already competing at near-frontier levels with models like Kimi K3, making domestic restrictions a gift to everyone who didn't restrict theirs. The underlying fight is about whether AI compounds existing power concentration or distributes it — and closed-model labs have a clear answer that happens to align with their business interests. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=2JOMgVkJN&id=UEal1HJub) --- ## Also notable - **ASML gives all 45,000 employees a €20,000 share grant as AI demand drives record sales:** ASML is awarding every employee a one-time €20,000 share grant vesting January 1, 2030, contingent on staying with the company — roughly €900 million total, one of the largest single employee payouts in European tech history — as the company raised its annual sales forecast to €43–45 billion and plans a 30% production capacity expansion by 2027. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/lVQxM68Az) - **Samsung Foundry faces 81.5% intent-to-leave rate over 100x bonus gap with memory division:** A union-led survey found 81.5% of Samsung Foundry workers plan to leave, driven by memory division workers receiving ~600 million won ($400,000) bonuses each while foundry and mobile employees receive a fraction of that — a retention crisis worth watching for anyone tracking semiconductor talent dynamics. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/NWB4uM1gq) - **JPMorgan's Dimon says AI has already eliminated 30–40% of jobs in some divisions:** During JPMorgan's Q2 earnings call, CEO Jamie Dimon disclosed that AI has already eliminated 30–40% of jobs in some divisions, while CFO Jeremy Barnum flagged rising token costs as a new expense line to watch in H2 2026 — the clearest executive-level confirmation yet of AI-driven headcount reduction at a major financial institution. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/us9Z7HF0h) - **Monzo founder Tom Blomfield joins Anthropic's compute team:** Tom Blomfield is leaving Y Combinator to join Anthropic as a member of technical staff on the compute team, working under chief compute officer Tom Brown on infrastructure involving up to 1 million Google TPUs and 3.5 gigawatts of next-gen chip capacity — joining a 2026 cohort that also includes Andrej Karpathy and Nobel laureate John Jumper. [Read more](https://daily.dev/feed-by-ids?id=nMPMSCNj3&id=R9jzd1AFN) - **Thomson Reuters cuts 500 engineering roles, plans to hire 250+ 'AI-native' engineers:** Thomson Reuters is eliminating roughly 5.2% of its operations and technology division while simultaneously hiring over 250 net-new positions described as senior and AI-native, with shares rising ~5% on the news — a concrete example of the AI-driven engineering role restructuring now spreading beyond pure tech companies. [Read more](https://daily.dev/posts/11NPtoPkf) ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Sticker shock has execs rethinking this whole AI thing](https://daily.dev/posts/sticker-shock-has-execs-rethinking-this-whole-ai-thing-ywgulwvsx) · The Register · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Meta cuts 8,000 jobs and cancels 6,000 open roles as $135B AI spending reshapes the company from the inside](https://daily.dev/posts/meta-cuts-8-000-jobs-and-cancels-6-000-open-roles-as-135b-ai-spending-reshapes-the-company-from-the-w2auihg8i) · The Next Web · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [The token bill comes due: Inside the industry scramble to manage AI’s runaway costs](https://daily.dev/posts/the-token-bill-comes-due-inside-the-industry-scramble-to-manage-ai-s-runaway-costs-glxojg09s) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#open-source](https://daily.dev/tags/open-source), [#ai-agents](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-agents) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/verizon-cuts-3-000-retail-jobs-ai-token-costs-hit-salary-level-spend-gw7irohy1) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"DiscussionForumPosting","mainEntityOfPage":"https://daily.dev/posts/verizon-cuts-3-000-retail-jobs-ai-token-costs-hit-salary-level-spend-gw7irohy1","headline":"Verizon cuts 3,000 retail jobs, AI token costs hit salary-level spend","text":"Verizon is laying off 3,000 retail workers and franchising 274 stores, with its CEO explicitly citing AI as the replacement for customer service work. 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