Weekly briefing · 6 October 2026
US tech cuts jump 77% as Europe’s AI and defence tech boom
US tech job cuts jumped in September while Europe’s AI and defence startups boomed. Plus OpenAI’s Codex upgrade and a second court blocking the $100k H-1B fee.
- Hiring market
US tech job cuts jump 77% in a month
US tech companies announced 10,799 job cuts in September, up 77% on August, even though job cuts across the US as a whole fell. Tech accounts for 29% of all US job cuts announced this year. Across all industries, employers have named AI as the reason for about 120,000 cuts in 2026, more than any other reason.
What it means for hiringThere are more experienced engineers on the market than a year ago, so strong generalists are easier to find. People who have shipped AI into production are still scarce, and that is where the competition is.
- AI
Mistral releases Large 4, a frontier model built in Europe
Mistral, the Paris AI company, released Mistral Large 4, a model with 1 trillion parameters. Developers can use it through Mistral’s platform now, and from 27 October companies will be able to download it and run it themselves. It was trained in about two months in Mistral’s own data centres in Europe.
What it means for hiringOpen weights trained on European infrastructure make it more practical to run and fine-tune a frontier model in-house. Expect more demand in France and across the EU for ML, MLOps and inference engineers.
- Funding
European defence tech raises a record $7.4bn, led by Germany
European defence tech startups have raised $7.4 billion so far in 2026, almost three times as much as in all of 2025, according to Dealroom and Resilience Media. Germany leads with $3.5 billion, and Munich alone accounts for 40% of the money. Most of it is going into drones.
What it means for hiringDefence and dual-use startups now compete with AI companies for the same embedded, robotics, computer vision and ML engineers, especially in Munich. If you hire these profiles in Germany, expect more competition for every shortlist.
- Data & engineering
OpenAI pushes Codex towards teams of coding agents
OpenAI upgraded Codex, its AI coding tool, at its DevDay event on 29 September. Engineers can now run several coding agents at once and track them in one place, have AI review code changes automatically, and use a new security service that scans code for problems and prepares fixes.
What it means for hiringMore of an engineer’s day is moving from writing code to directing, reviewing and securing what agents produce. That makes senior engineers with strong review, architecture and security judgement more valuable, not less.
- Regulation
A second US court blocks the $100,000 H-1B fee
On 30 September a federal court in California blocked US agencies from enforcing the $100,000 fee on H-1B work visas, including a recent extension that would have kept it in place until September 2027. It is the second court to block the fee. The first ruling, in Massachusetts, is under appeal, and a separate fee of about $103,000 has been proposed but is not yet in force.
What it means for hiringUS companies can sponsor engineers from abroad without the surcharge for now, but the legal fight is not over. Keep a European or remote option open for hard-to-fill roles.
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