AI Disruption Prompts Australia's WiseTech to Cut a Third of Global Workforce

FILE PHOTO: Figurines with computers and smartphones are seen in front of the words "Artificial Intelligence AI" in this illustration taken, February 19, 2024. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo

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09:44-25 February 2026 AD ـ 10 Ramadan 1447 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

09:44-25 February 2026 AD ـ 10 Ramadan 1447 AH

AI Disruption Prompts Australia's WiseTech to Cut a Third of Global Workforce

Australian software firm WiseTech Global will axe about 2,000 jobs, nearly a third of its global workforce, in a two-year restructuring that could rank among the country's largest artificial intelligence-linked job reductions.

Shares of the company, which announced an estimate-beating first-half profit on Wednesday, closed 11.1% higher at A$47.74, while Australia's benchmark S&P ASX 200 rose 1.2%.

The layoffs highlight how quickly AI is reshaping workplaces globally, as fast-improving automation tools ‌take over ‌routine administrative work and handle complex coding tasks ‌with increasing ⁠speed and precision, driving ⁠widespread adoption.

Last month, Amazon announced 16,000 job cuts worldwide in a second round of redundancies at the tech giant in three months, adding to a wave of redundancies by US companies across sectors this year.

WiseTech, which makes shipping and logistics management software, plans to integrate AI into its customer software as well as internal operations, affecting around 29% ⁠of its global workforce of around 7,000 across 40 ‌countries.

The cuts could shrink some ‌teams by half, starting with product and development, and customer service roles across ‌the organization. One of the divisions affected will be WiseTech's US cloud ‌computing arm, E2open, acquired in August for $2.1 billion, which may see cuts of up to 50%.

"Software development has experienced its most significant shift in decades," Reuters quoted WiseTech Chief Executive Officer Zubin Appoo as saying.

"The era of manually writing code ‌as the core act of engineering is over."

WiseTech, founded more than three decades ago, reported first-half underlying net ⁠profit of $114.5 ⁠million, 6% ahead of market consensus, and announced an interim dividend of 6.8 cents while reaffirming its full-year outlook.

Despite the day's surge, WiseTech's shares remain 68% below their November 2024 peak, as allegations surrounding founder and former CEO Richard White, including claims of payments to an alleged former lover, fueled an investor exodus. Concerns around how AI would affect the software maker also kept the stock under pressure.

"With recent share price weakness was more governance-driven than fundamental and with the fiscal 2026 guidance reaffirmed, the underlying trajectory remains sustainable despite near-term disruption," said Marc Jocum, senior product and investment strategist at Global X ETFs.

OpenAI's Altman Says AI Benefits Warrant Accepting Some Risks

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event in Tokyo, Japan February 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

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08:38-5 October 2026 AD ـ 24 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

08:38-5 October 2026 AD ـ 24 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

OpenAI's Altman Says AI Benefits Warrant Accepting Some Risks

FILE PHOTO: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attends an event in Tokyo, Japan February 3, 2025. REUTERS/Kim Kyung-Hoon/File Photo

OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman ‌said the benefits of artificial intelligence justify accepting some risks and argued the technology should remain broadly accessible to the public

"We believe that the world should accept some bad things happening for the benefits of this technology and people having the agency," Altman said in an interview with Politico's technology-focused newsletter Decoded.

Altman said there remained a fundamental difference in worldview between OpenAI and rival Anthropic on AI regulation, adding: "I think there's a lot of daylight."

"I disagree, but I understand the perspective of people who are like, 'This technology is going ‌to get so ‌powerful, and it's so dangerous, that a ‌single ⁠lab in San ⁠Francisco should have it and make sure nothing bad happens, and kind of figure out how to dole out the benefits,'" Altman said.

He called that "a completely unacceptable trade-off" that runs counter to the "lighter-touch regulatory stance" backed by OpenAI.

"I wouldn't take a trade of saying, 'We'll make sure there's no major hacks, there's no misuse of this ⁠technology, there's zero scams, there's zero all the other ‌bad things that will happen,'" Altman ‌said. "Because I think people will do tremendously — orders of magnitude more — good ‌stuff than bad stuff."

Altman's remarks come amid a growing debate ‌within the AI industry over the pace of development and the risks posed by increasingly capable systems.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei in September published an essay calling on the industry to slow down to "pace the frontier," a stance ‌that Altman publicly endorsed. Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned in September, saying the people building AI believe ⁠it "could kill ⁠us all by the end of the decade.

Reuters reported in September that Anthropic warned that, despite AI's potential benefits, the technology can sometimes act in ways that run counter to its makers' intentions and penetrate other companies' systems. The company said advanced models could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown,conceal or manipulate information," or generate outputs that could be interpreted as "coercive, deceptive, or manipulative."

However, US President Donald Trump has largely dismissed calls for new restrictions, arguing they would make it harder for American companies to compete with Chinese rivals. He has repeatedly said existing law enforcement agencies, including the Justice Department, provide sufficient safeguards and that no new rules are needed.

Technology

OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo

Asharq Al Awsat

11:02-2 October 2026 AD ـ 21 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

11:02-2 October 2026 AD ـ 21 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

OpenAI Says 3 Staffers Fired for Mishandling 'Sensitive' Info

FILE PHOTO: An OpenAI logo is displayed at Moscone Center during the Dreamforce 2026 technology summit in San Francisco, California, US, September 17, 2026. REUTERS/Carlos Barria///File Photo

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI said Thursday that it has fired three researchers for allegedly mishandling "sensitive information" and violating company policies, including work that involved an external organization that evaluates artificial intelligence models.

The San Francisco-based AI lab did not confirm their identities, but at least two of the employees worked on safety and alignment, according to the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg.

"We have parted ways with three individuals," OpenAI told AFP in a statement.

"Our investigation confirmed that these individuals mishandled sensitive information outside established company procedures, violating our policies and breaking the trust essential to our work."

The firings come amid a tense debate about AI safety and whether the technology presents an existential risk to humanity.

Last month, a 27-year-old researcher named Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic with a stark warning that the leading AI labs, including OpenAI, where he previously worked, were "gambling with our lives" by racing toward developing ever more powerful models.

The three researchers fired by OpenAI are Jasmine Wang, Tomek Korbak, and Mikita Balesni, according to the WSJ. The researchers did not immediately respond to AFP's request for comment.

All three have regularly posted about AI safety-related issues on X in recent weeks.

"i am at OpenAI and i think AI is >10% likely to kill all humans," Balesni posted on September 10, echoing statements made by other AI employees in recent weeks.

As speculation swirled about why employees at OpenAI and Anthropic were speaking so freely about their personal beliefs, Korbak jumped into the public discourse.

"I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does. I am very happy that Im allowed to say 'I'm quite unhappy with much of what OpenAI does,'" Korbak wrote on September 11.

"It's hard to overstate how dangerous speeding towards RSI is," Wang posted in response to Coxon's resignation, referring to recursive self-improvement, which is a technique where software is designed to continuously teach itself.

Leading US tech companies signed a voluntary pledge this week to regulate themselves on safety after meeting with President Donald Trump at the White House.

Trump called it a "morally binding" commitment to build adequate safeguards on the fast-moving technology.

Executives from Nvidia, Google, Meta, xAI, OpenAI and Anthropic signed the agreement.
Concerns about the safety of advanced AI models have escalated in recent months.

OpenAI canceled the release of a new model, Astra 6.1, because it deemed the model unreliable and found that it frequently ignored instructions.

Instead, the company launched GPT-6.1 Sol, an updated version of a different model, during its annual DevDay conference on Tuesday from San Francisco. OpenAI said Sol would cost one-fifth the price of Astra.

In July, AI agents developed by OpenAI attacked Hugging Face, an AI model and application library, during an incident where the autonomous software escaped its confined testing environment.

Since then, additional security incidents have been reported that involved models developed by OpenAI, Anthropic and Google.

On Thursday, cybersecurity firm Asymmetric Security said in a report that agents developed by OpenAI covered up their own tracks after gaining unauthorized access to government websites.

The Federal Trade Commission launched a broad investigation into artificial intelligence safety practices at Anthropic and OpenAI, the Washington Post reported on Wednesday, though the scope of the inquiry is unclear.

Technology

Effective Altruism: The Philosophy Behind Silicon Valley's AI Fears

Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP

Asharq Al Awsat

06:17-2 October 2026 AD ـ 21 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

Asharq Al Awsat

06:17-2 October 2026 AD ـ 21 Rabi’ Al-Thani 1448 AH

Effective Altruism: The Philosophy Behind Silicon Valley's AI Fears

Effective Altruism conspicuously connects a number of leaders in American tech and finance. ANDREJ IVANOV / AFP

Dario Amodei says he is not part of it. But the Anthropic chief's personal and professional circle is entwined with Effective Altruism (EA), a philanthropic movement that has become one of the most contested ideas in Washington and Silicon Valley.

To its proponents, EA is a rational, evidence-based way to do good. To many in the Trump administration, it fuels unfounded and exaggerated fears about artificial intelligence -- the kind of warnings Amodei has become known for.

Here are some facts about EA:

- Philosophical roots -

EA is a loosely defined movement that uses evidence and reason to work out how to do the most good with a person's money and time.

Its intellectual roots can be traced to Australian philosopher Peter Singer.

If reasonable people would agree it is morally right to ruin one's clothes to save a drowning child, he argued in 1972, they should also sacrifice greater resources and comforts to save lives in foreign lands -- because the distance should not matter.

The idea took hold among wealthy donors who felt a moral obligation to give, but wanted their money to do as much good as possible.

- Giving what you can -

EA took shape as a decentralized movement during the heady, techno-optimistic days of the late 2000s and early 2010s -- when many believed social media and smartphones would promote empathy and democracy.

In 2007, financial professionals Holden Karnofsky and Elie Hassenfeld quit their jobs to launch GiveWell, which produced data-driven analyses of charities' effectiveness.

Karnofsky was once Amodei's roommate, and is now married to his sister Daniela, who co-founded Anthropic with him.

Two years later, Oxford University philosophers William MacAskill and Toby Ord launched "Giving What We Can," encouraging people to donate at least 10 percent of their income to tackling global poverty.

"The critique of the status quo was that existing attempts to evaluate the work of charities and nonprofits focused on things like overhead and executive pay," Theodore Lechterman, a philosophy professor at IE University in Madrid, told AFP.

GiveWell and others wanted to ask, "How much good is this organization actually doing in the world?" Lechterman said.

EA's three big causes today are global poverty, factory-farmed animals and "the most controversial one -- global catastrophic risk," said Richard Chappell, a professor at University of Miami and an EA proponent.

That worry about the future is where AI comes in.

- Data-driven -

Over the last 15 years, EA has found eager followers in American tech and some corners of Wall Street.

"Since the movement is data driven, it's a relatively easier sell to people who...make decisions on the basis of data," Lechterman said.

That numbers-backed thinking means engineers, software developers or entrepreneurs might all find it more appealing than humanities graduates, Lechterman said.

Among them was Sam Bankman-Fried, the crypto-finance wunderkind sentenced in 2024 to 25 years in prison for fraud.

A vocal champion of the movement, Bankman-Fried said he went into finance to make a fortune he could give away.

He also was an early investor in Anthropic.

- EA and AI -

As AI worries grew, EA philosophers such as MacAskill were "kind of thinking about the future of humanity," said Brian Berkey of the University of Pennsylvania.

The result was long-termism, a philosophy that "came to play a very central role" in the movement.

MacAskill reportedly brokered contacts between Bankman-Fried and Elon Musk.

Musk was for years outspoken about the threat he believed AI posed to humanity, and in 2015 helped create OpenAI to guard against it.

EA's focus on AI also owes much to a neighboring movement, rationalism -- an online community that grew up around writer Eliezer Yudkowsky, who has warned since the 2000s that superintelligent AI could wipe out humanity.

The two movements overlap heavily in membership and ideas, sharing an emphasis on reasoning through evidence and probabilities, and a conviction that preventing human extinction should be a top priority.

Both converged last month on Jacob Coxon, a 27-year-old researcher who quit Anthropic warning that AI companies were "gambling with our lives." His post was viewed more than 100 million times.

Days later, Amodei published a lengthy essay arguing that AI's mounting risks warranted a slowdown.

AI Disruption Prompts Australia's WiseTech to Cut a Third of Global Workforce

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