Did AI cut Oracle's 359 Washington jobs? Its own notice does not say so

Oracle America has told Washington's Employment Security Department it will cut 359 jobs in the state, in a WARN notice filed this month and signed by HR senior vice-president Anje Dodson. Affected staff were notified on Monday 14 September 2026 and their last day is 13 November. The roles are concentrated in engineering: dozens of software developers, core infrastructure and platform engineers, site reliability engineers and program managers, alongside vice-presidents, directors of engineering and product management, and principal data scientists. The notice says Oracle's two downtown Seattle sites, at the Russell Investments Center on 2nd Avenue and at 2025 5th Avenue, are not closing, and that the work is not being relocated or contracted out. It follows 491 Washington cuts in March, taking the state total to 850 this year. What Oracle has not said is that AI is doing this work: internal emails to affected staff cited a "broader organizational change". Oracle's own annual filing does say deploying AI across its operations reduced headcount, by roughly 21,000 globally last fiscal year, but no employer statement ties these 359 jobs to automation. So this is recorded here as a layoff at a company spending heavily on AI, not as AI replacement.