The era of unregulated AI is over, and most builders haven’t updated their mental model yet.

From AI layoffs and frontier laws to the boring questions founders now have to answer”

A lot of builders still talk about AI as if the rules have not caught up yet.
That mental model is already out of date.

On the labour side, the numbers have moved from hypothetical to measurable. In 2025 there were about 1.2 million layoffs in the US; roughly 55,000 of them – around 4–5% – were explicitly attributed to AI. In Q1 2026 alone, tech firms cut