Jeff Bezos says AI will let people work three days a week, the same day Amazon confirmed another round of job cuts

Amazon's founder and executive chairman Jeff Bezos says AI productivity will make workers scarce, not surplus, and that some people will choose a three-day week. He said it in a Fox News "Special Report" interview with Bret Baier, aired on 7 October 2026 and taped at Blue Origin's Cape Canaveral factory. "Some people will also decide, you know what? I can support my family by working three days a week," Bezos said. "That's what productivity in the economy means." He went further: "It's going to actually be difficult to hire people because the productivity in the economy is going to make it so that if people don't want to work two jobs, they won't have to." Baier put Amazon's own record to him, roughly 30,000 corporate roles cut since late last year. Bezos said Amazon was in a "very special position" after expanding its workforce heavily during the pandemic, and, according to Fox News, acknowledged public fears about AI's effect on jobs while saying he disagreed with those predicting a worse outcome. The same day, Reuters reported that Amazon had confirmed a fresh cut of what it called a small number of jobs, mainly in its Stores unit, with a person familiar putting it at fewer than 1,000 white-collar roles across the United States, India and the United Kingdom. Amazon's statement gave no reason beyond adjusting the structure of the Stores business and did not mention AI, so those cuts are not an entry in the AI layoffs tracker on this site. Bezos has a stake in the argument: he chairs Amazon, which is one of the largest buyers and sellers of AI computing, and co-founded Prometheus, an AI engineering start-up he described in the same interview. The quotes come from Fox News's own write-up of the interview; no transcript was published.