Pinterest cracks down on dissent, fires engineers for an internal layoff tool as AI shake-ups keep employees on edge and in line

Pinterest fired two employees who created a tool for tracking the company’s layoffs in a move that highlights how power has largely shifted from employees back to employers in corporate America.

Pinterest last week announced it would lay off less than 15% of its workforce and shed office space as part of a restructuring running through the end of September that will reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and AI products, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

After the announcement, in a meeting led by the company’s chief technology officer, Matt Madrigal, Pinterest’s chief security officer, Andy Steingruebl, told engineers company leaders wouldn’t be distributing a list of laid-off employees to protect the individuals’ privacy in line with Pinterest’s privacy policies. Two engineers later built their own internal tool to track laid-off employees ahead of an upcoming town hall with CEO Bill Ready last week, according to Pinterest.

“After being clearly informed that Pinterest would not broadly share information identifying impacted employees, two engineers wrote custom scripts improperly accessing confidential company information to identify the locations and names of all dismissed employees and then shared it more broadly,” a Pinterest sp...