Jack Dorsey

Block laid off around 4,000 people, roughly 40% of its workforce, in an AI-centered reorganization six months before the Q2 2026 results, and Jack Dorsey's shareholder letter carried the line that follows from it: "Starting in June, agentic AI helped write and review nearly all of our production code changes." That is a self-reported claim from a listed payments company, with no definition given for "nearly all" or for "review".

The pricing question is where Dorsey is publicly comfortable. Block deployed AI tools to Square merchants and Cash App users without deciding how to charge for them; on the analyst call he framed that as a choice: "We're in a fortunate position where we can experiment with a number of models, and then choose the right one that's going to align all of our incentives with our customers." The comfort has a source. At Q2 2026 gross profit rose 25% to $3.2bn against revenue up 10% to $6.62bn, while net income fell 83% to $89m under severance. The value of the AI shift was already banked in the cost structure, not billed.

An earlier round of Block cuts, in March 2026, cited Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 by name, and the stock rose 25%.

Dorsey's public framing of Buzz, "decentralized, self-sovereign", sits against Block's own ARCHITECTURE.md: "The relay is the single source of truth… There is no peer-to-peer event exchange, no gossip, no replication."