California Launches First AI Unemployment Tracker to Monitor Labor-Market Impact

Concerns about AI replacing jobs have intensified since ChatGPT-3.5 was released publicly in November 2022. The California Employment Development Department, or EDD, worked with the University of California’s California Policy Lab to create CAIT, a monthly tracker linking unemployment insurance claims with occupations’ exposure to AI. The tool is intended to help the government deploy job-search and retraining resources earlier, but its indicators show correlation and cannot prove that AI caused layoffs.

California Governor Gavin Newsom launched CAIT on June 25, 2026, with its first analysis covering data through May 2026. Claims from workers in highly AI-exposed occupations did not rise significantly statewide, but remained elevated among college graduates in such jobs, in the San Francisco Bay Area and in professional services. Monthly claims from bachelor’s degree holders rose from about 13,000 in November 2022 to more than 22,000 in July 2023, an increase of more than 50%, before recently settling at about 16,000.