Stanford study finds 16% drop in early-career hiring in AI-exposed jobs, and crypto is feeling it

The robots aren’t taking everyone’s jobs. They’re just not letting the new kids get one in the first place.

A working paper from the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, released in November 2025, found that workers aged 22 to 25 in occupations most exposed to AI experienced a 16% relative decline in employment after generative AI went mainstream. The decline persisted even after controlling for other factors that might explain why companies were hiring less. The kicker: older workers in those same roles were either holding steady or actually growing in number.

What the data actually shows

The study, authored by Erik Brynjolfsson, Bharat Chandar, and Ruyu Chen, is titled “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence.”

The team used high-frequency payroll records from ADP, the largest payroll provider in the US. This isn’t survey data or LinkedIn scraping. It’s actual payroll records covering millions of workers, which makes the signal considerably harder to dismiss.

The employment decline wasn’t showing up as wage cuts. Companies weren’t paying entry-level workers less. They were simply hiring fewer of them.

The damage was concentrated in roles where AI automates tasks rather than augmenting them. Junior software development and customer service positions took the hardest hits. These are the exact jobs that used to serve as on-ramps for early-career workers to build skills and climb into more senior positions.

Crypto’s front-row seat to the trend

Coinbase cut approximately 14% of its workforce, around 700 positions, in May 2026. The company attributed the reductions to AI-driven restructuring. Crypto.com followed a similar playbook, implementing a 12% staff cut in March 2026 under comparable rationale.

Data from a16z paints an even starker picture of the talent migration underway. Roughly 1,000 jobs have shifted from crypto firms to AI startups since late 2022. Entry-level hiring at crypto companies contracted sharply in early 2026, suggesting that the Stanford study’s broader findings are playing out in real time within the digital asset industry.

What this means for the industry and investors

If the entry-level pipeline dries up, where do the next generation of crypto developers, security researchers, and protocol engineers come from? The senior talent that companies are retaining today had to start somewhere. They learned by doing grunt work that AI now handles.

A 16% decline in early-career hiring doesn’t sound catastrophic in a single quarter. Sustained over five or ten years, it means an entire generation of workers who never developed the foundational skills that make senior talent valuable in the first place.

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