Dell, Intel, and Tesla’s big job cuts now place them at the top of the rankings for all tech layoffs in 2024. Data Source: Layoffs.fyi. (Graphic by Visual Capitalist via Getty Images)
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Gina Raimondo spent four years as Joe Biden’s Commerce Secretary. Eric Holcomb spent eight as the Republican governor of Indiana. This week they put their names on the same nonprofit, alongside former Republican Speaker Paul Ryan and Liz Shuler, who runs the AFL-CIO. What pulled that group into one room was a $500 million fund, and the four largest names in artificial intelligence had written the first checks.
The organization is called RAISE US, and it launched on June 25 with more than $500 million secured against a $1 billion goal. Its job is to retrain American workers for an economy being reshaped by AI. OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, and Amazon are the anchor backers. The coverage wrote it up the obvious way: the companies building the machines that take jobs are paying to clean up the mess.
That story has a problem. The mess, at the scale implied, is not yet in the data. The $500 million is not an apology for jobs already lost. It is a down payment on the political permission to keep building.
The Coalition Behind The Fund
RAISE US is built to look exactly like what it is, a project engineered for durability. Raimondo and Holcomb co-chair it. The advisory board reaches from Paul Ryan to organized labor. More than two dozen founding organizations sit behind the four AI anchors, among them Bank of America, IBM, Mastercard, Eli Lilly, Cisco, and Workday, with the Rockefeller, Ford, and Walton foundations supplying philanthropic cover. The first programs start in four states picked for political balance: Arkansas, Maryland, Utah, and Connecticut.
The pilots themselves are modest and concrete:
- Wage insurance for workers moving between jobs
- Incentives for companies to retrain staff rather than cut them
- AI-powered career coaching
- Short-term credential programs tied to what local employers say they need
Panic does not look like this. A retraining program with wage insurance and credential pilots, spread across four politically balanced states, is the work of an industry building a coalition, not one bracing for collapse.
The Damage The Numbers Don’t Show
The case that AI is already gutting payrolls rests on one number, and the number does not say what it is used to say. Challenger, Gray & Christmas counted 87,714 job cuts this year where employers named AI as the reason, more than in all of 2025. It is a real figure and a striking one. It is also self-reported, the reason a company volunteers in a layoff announcement, and it accounts for 22 percent of cuts this year. The other 78 percent were blamed on cost, restructuring, soft demand, and the ordinary weather of a slow hiring market.
Step back from the announcements to the payrolls and the picture cools further. There has been no economy-wide wave of white-collar layoffs. We made that case in late May, before Sam…
Read More: Why AI Giants Are Investing $500 Million To Retrain American Workforce
