TechPulse USA

By TechPulse USA · 18 October 2026 Photo: Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World. Disney expects to spend $180 million over three years hiring 66 staff from bankrupt chatbot startup Character.AI. Credit: Katie Rommel-Esham / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0). Disney has put a price on the AI talent war, and the number is so lopsided it reads like a typo. In a Delaware bankruptcy filing this week, the entertainment giant disclosed that it expects to spend $180 million over three years on compensation and retention for 66 employees hired away from Character.AI — the chatbot startup it once accused of stealing its characters. For the technology those same people built, Disney offered $20 million. Do the division and the message is blunt: to Disney, the engineers are worth nine times the code. The twist nobody should miss? Two weeks before signing off on those cheques, Disney laid off several hundred of its own people, including tech staff. The $180 million payroll, explained The fig...

By TechPulse USA Newsroom — Mountain View, California | 16 October 2026 Netflix spent a decade telling the world it was a technology company that happened to make television. On Wednesday morning, it started firing the technology company. Roughly 1,000 people — about 6% of Netflix's global workforce — were let go on 14 October in the company's biggest round of layoffs since 2022. The cut was announced in a staff email from co-chief executives Ted Sarandos and Greg Peters, first reported by The Wall Street Journal . The email's most telling line wasn't a number. It was a list: the "greatest impact" falls on product, tech, legal and human-resources teams. Read that list twice. The company that built its myth on recommendation algorithms, Open Connect and a famously ruthless engineering culture is choosing to shrink the org that made it famous — while insisting, in the same breath, that this is about growth. Netflix's Los Gatos headquarters, where mu...