California Policy Lab AI-Unemployment Tracker (web)

Citation

Hyman, B., von Wachter, T., Herrera, D., Moghadam, R., Morris, J., Motghare, S., Segal, K., and Chengappa, N. California Policy Lab (CPL). “California AI-Unemployment Tracker (CAIT).” Web page, June 25, 2026, with monthly updates through September 2026. https://capolicylab.org/california-ai-unemployment-tracker/. Read 2026-11-09.

Bottom line

• The California AI-Unemployment Tracker (CAIT) counts unemployment insurance (UI) claims by how exposed to AI the claimant’s last job was. CPL built it with the Employment Development Department (EDD).
• The June 2026 report finds no statewide surge in AI-related layoffs through May 2026. Claims rose for college-educated workers in high-exposure jobs, in the San Francisco Bay Area and in technology sectors.
• The September 2026 update gives three-month averages of high-exposure claims of about 49,900 (potential measure) and 65,300 (observed measure).

Background

CPL is a nonpartisan research center at the University of California, with sites in Berkeley, Los Angeles and Sacramento. This page is the home of the tracker. It links the June 2026 report, a technical appendix, a list of frequently asked questions and the launch release. It gives the July, August and September 2026 updates, the definitions, the method, the data limits and the release schedule to January 2027.

Key claims

• “The California Employment Development Department partnered with the nonpartisan California Policy Lab at the University of California to conduct research to measure AI-related job loss trends in California, using Unemployment Insurance claims data, combined with AI exposure measures.” (Tracking AI-Related Job Loss Using Unemployment Insurance Claims Data in California)
• “The September 2026 CAIT data show a modest increase in seasonally adjusted UI claims from high-AI-exposure occupations relative to the prior month, though the change remained within the range of recent historical fluctuations.” (Latest Monthly Update, September 2026 Update)
• “Using the observed AI exposure measure, the 3-month moving average of high-AI-exposure claims fell by about 6,500 (down about 9.1%), from about 71,800 to 65,300 new initial claims.” (Latest Monthly Update, September 2026 Update)
• “Since the release of ChatGPT-3.5 in 2022, statewide UI claims through May 2026 show no evidence of a surge in AI-related layoffs.” (Finding 1)
• “The proportion of UI claims coming from AI-exposed workers has also not seen a statistically significant increase relative to prior to the pandemic.” (Finding 1)
• “Over this same period, claims from workers in occupations with high AI exposure in the San Francisco Bay Area also experienced a sharp and sustained increase.” (Finding 3)
• “The Tracker should be interpreted as a descriptive signal, not causal evidence, of AI-driven job loss.” (Context for Using These Data)

Evidence and method

State administrative data: EDD UI claims records from January 2017. Each claimant gets an AI exposure score from the occupation that the claimant reports. The potential measure comes from Eloundou et al. (2024) in Science. The observed measure comes from the Anthropic Economic Index (Handa et al., 2025) on arXiv. The top 25 percent of scores make the high exposure group.

The trend figures leave out the pandemic surge from March 2020 to January 2022. The tabulated data are free to download.

Limits

The page lists its own limits. UI claims leave out workers who do not apply, the self-employed and gig workers. Occupations are self-reported and not verified. The page suppresses cells with very few claims, and later updates can revise counts. The tracker does not measure AI as the cause of a layoff. It does not cover compute, training programs or public sector employers.

The September update calls the change in seasonally adjusted claims an increase. Its two three-month averages fall, and its footnotes say those averages are “not seasonally adjusted”.

The September, August and July figures here match the EDD AI and the Labor Market page. The launch release names the Governor’s Office as a third partner; this page names only EDD and CPL. The release gives master’s and PhD claim figures that this page does not give. The release also says the Information sector “has recently fallen back to pre-generative AI levels”. This page says AI-exposed claims were “particularly elevated statewide in technology sectors such as Information and Professional Services” over the period through May 2026. It does not single out the Information sector as back to its earlier level.