There’s a particular cruelty to Zhou’s situation that I keep coming back to. The man spent his working days talking to AI — testing it, correcting it, making it smarter — and then watched that same technology hand his employer the excuse to show him the door. His company, a Hangzhou tech firm, replaced him with the large language models he was paid to supervise, offered him a lesser role with a 40% salary cut, and terminated his contract when he refused to swallow it. A court just told them that it was illegal twice. What US companies are doing openly, Chinese courts are now blocking The pattern in American tech has been hard to miss. Companies announce sweeping AI investments, then lay off workers in the same breath or in the same quarter. The message is rarely subtle: we’re automating this, and you’re the cost savings that fund it. Meta, Microsoft, Google — the list of companies simultaneously cutting headcount and pouring billions into AI infrastructure keeps growing. The logic is treated as self-evident.…