Liu never expected to be the generation that got automated out. At 26, she was young, adaptable, and working in content operations at one of China's largest internet companies in Hangzhou — the kind of job that felt modern, creative, and safe.
Then came the mandate. In early 2026, her company required all employees to begin using AI tools in their daily work. At first, it felt like just another corporate initiative — the kind that generates a few training sessions and then quietly fades. But this didn't fade.
"Starting in March, they began quietly firing coworkers," Liu told Reuters, asking that her full name and company not be published because of the sensitivity of the subject. The layoffs weren't dramatic. No mass emails. No all-hands meetings. They were surgical — individual conversations, quiet exits, positions simply not renewed.
The pattern Liu observed was methodical: employees were encouraged — then expected — to input their entire workflows into OpenClaw, an AI agent platform that had swept through Chinese tech companies earlier that year. OpenClaw runs directly on users' operating systems, automating tasks like managing email, browsing the web, scheduling, and interacting with online services. Once the system absorbed someone's routines, the logic of keeping that person became harder to justify to management.
"Tasks that most people perform can be completely replaced by OpenClaw," Liu said. "After a person enters all their workflows into it, they can basically be fired."
She wasn't being cynical — she was being descriptive. The company also began reducing its intake of new graduates, a shift Liu noticed but that wasn't officially announced. Entry-level positions, the traditional on-ramp to a tech career in China, were evaporating.
Liu's experience wasn't isolated. Nine Chinese employees from industries including technology, entertainment, and advertising told Reuters the same pattern was repeating across the country. Unlike Western companies that publicly announce mass layoffs and blame AI directly, Chinese firms were pursuing productivity gains quietly — small-scale cuts that wouldn't trigger regulatory scrutiny or social instability concerns.
Under Chinese labor law, companies must get government approval for layoffs exceeding 10 percent of their workforce. Courts had already ruled against at least three companies that fired employees to replace them with AI. So the strategy evolved: instead of mass termination, a slow bleed. Natural attrition. Contract non-renewals. Gradual reductions that never cross the regulatory threshold.
An engineer at Alibaba's cloud computing division confirmed that AI-driven layoffs had begun in parts of the company and were likely to continue through "gradual cuts and natural employee departures, rather than one massive wave."
The pressure wasn't just about losing your job — it was about being measured by your AI adoption. Some companies began ranking employees by their "token use" — a unit measuring AI computing resource consumption — and factoring it into performance reviews and promotion prospects.
"It's a relatively forced practice," said a big data engineer at a Chinese tech giant, speaking on condition of anonymity. "You shouldn't use AI just for the sake of using it." But the message was clear: adapt quickly or become the next quiet exit.
"I still can't shake the feeling that I'm getting closer to being replaced," he added.
For Liu, the resignation is philosophical. "Those who don't use AI will be weeded out," she said, matter-of-factly. Then, more quietly: "It's only a matter of time before AI permeates every aspect of life. I want to go back to farming or become an artisan."
On the Chinese social media app RedNote, the hashtag "AI anxiety" has drawn more than 7.8 million views. Liu's generation — the most educated in Chinese history, facing record youth unemployment — is caught between a government that wants AI adoption at 70 percent by 2027 and a labor market that has no room for the people AI is replacing.