Tech
Laid-off Oracle workers tried to negotiate better severance. Oracle said no.
As was widely reported, Oracle axed an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 people via email on March 31.
One of the employees cut that day told TechCrunch about the experience: “I had, like, this weird feeling in my stomach. I went to go sign into the VPN, and the VPN was like, ‘this user doesn’t exist anymore.’ Then I called my friend, and I was like, ‘Hey, can you see me in Slack?’ And she said, ‘No, your account’s been deactivated.’”
The person soon received an email stating their role was terminated immediately. The severance offer arrived a few days later. But Oracle’s terms would quickly become a point of contention — and some laid-off employees would push back.
Oracle offered fairly standard Corporate America terms to laid off employees. In exchange for signing a release waiving their right to sue, employees received four weeks of pay for the first year, plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks. The company was also paying for one month of COBRA insurance.
The catch: Although stock compensation often makes up a good chunk of a tech worker’s pay, particularly at Oracle, the company did not accelerate soon-to-vest RSUs. Any shares that hadn’t vested by the termination date were forfeited.
That held true even for stock granted as retention incentives or in place of salary increases tied to promotions. One long-tenured employee lost $1 million in stock that was just four months from vesting; RSUs made up about 70% of his compensation, Time reported.
Some employees also discovered that if they were classified as remote workers by the company, and didn’t work in a state with stronger worker provisions like California or New York, the company said they didn’t qualify for WARN Act protections.
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The WARN Act is a law that requires companies conducting mass layoffs to give employees two months notice prior to letting them go. It’s triggered when 50 or more people are impacted at one location. By classifying employees as remote workers, the minimum location requirements can be sidestepped.
Some people were unaware they were classified as remote workers, because they were near an office and worked on a hybrid schedule.
Even if they were covered by the WARN Act, this did not necessarily extend severance, the former Oracle employee said. That’s because Oracle included the two-months’ WARN notice pay in its existing calculation of four-weeks, plus one week per year.
For a short time, a group of employees tried to negotiate en masse with Oracle, according to a letter seen by TechCrunch. At least 90 people signed a public petition urging the database and cloud computing giant to match the terms of other big tech companies conducting mass layoffs in the name of AI.
For instance, Meta’s severance package, according to an email published by Business Insider, started at 16 weeks of base pay, plus two weeks for every year of employment and covered COBRA for 18 months.
Microsoft, which extended voluntary retirement offers to long-serving employees, provided accelerated stock vesting, a minimum of eight weeks’ pay, and an additional one to two weeks for every six months of service, depending on rank, the Seattle Times reported.
And Cloudflare, which just cut 20% of its employees, offered lump sum severance that was the equivalent of base pay through the end of 2026, plus healthcare coverage through the end of the year, and accelerated vesting of stock through August 15. So if an employee was close to obtaining another tranche, they will get it.
Oracle declined to negotiate, according to an email seen by TechCrunch. It was a take-it-or-leave scenario, the employee said.
When asked about its severance terms, classifying employees as remote, and the failed attempt by employees to negotiate more, Oracle declined to comment.
Such a reaction from the company isn’t a surprise, not even to those who hoped to negotiate. But it does underscore that for all the theoretical high pay (often via stocks) and perks that tech workers enjoy when it’s an employees’ market, they have very few protections in place when it isn’t.
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Tech
Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform
Nvidia adds a Sentry hardware monitoring design to its AI agent safety platform. See what OpenShell offers now and what IT teams still need to verify.
The post Nvidia Adds Hardware Monitoring Design to AI Agent Safety Platform appeared first on TechRepublic.
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Tech
Shopify opens checkout to browser-based AI agents
While some retailers, like Amazon (and Adidas, apparently!), are blocking AI agents from making purchases on users’ behalf on their respective platforms, e-commerce platform Shopify has moved in the other direction.
On Monday, the company announced that browser-based AI agents can now complete purchases on Shopify merchants’ sites, extending their capabilities beyond just searching for products and adding items to carts.
Shopify previously supported WebMCP for its storefronts and carts, allowing browser-based AI agents to comb through a Shopify retailer’s inventory, search for products, and add them to a cart. The addition of WebMCP support for checkout, including Shop Pay, means these agents can now read the checkout screen, update it, and submit the transaction with the buyer’s authorization, without relying on screenshots or scraping webpages, the company said.

This update introduces three new tools — get_checkout, update_checkout, and complete_checkout — that allow agents to inspect a checkout, change things like the customer’s address or delivery option, and then place an order after the buyer authorizes it.
The feature is rolling out to all eligible Shopify merchants, said Gil Greenberg, a staff product manager who works on agentic commerce at Shopify, in a post on X.
Shopify already offers a hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, which allows agents to work server-to-server. The proposed standard WebMCP, meanwhile, is designed for agents that work inside the buyer’s browser. Both leverage Shopify’s Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), which provides a common way to search for and discover products, build carts, and check out.
Top AI agents like Muse and Instinct already have direct partnerships with Shopify for agentic commerce. The Instinct partnership was announced today.
“If your agent is operating in the buyer’s browser, use WebMCP tools provided on storefront and checkout to efficiently complete order placement, instead of navigating HTML built for humans,” Greenberg wrote on X. “These WebMCP tools provide structured and efficient APIs, purposely designed — via UCP — to ensure accurate commerce facts, required disclosures, and handoff requirements.”
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Tech
Tesla delays Roadster 2 event again due to bad weather
Tesla is pushing back the reveal of its redesigned, second-generation Roadster once again, this time due to a forecast of severe weather.
Originally slated for October 1 in Waco, Texas, the event is being pushed to October 15, Tesla said.
“We’ve been tracking the weather closely with local meteorologists, but given the severe conditions predicted & because this event can only be held outdoors, we’ve made the difficult decision to reschedule,” the company wrote in a post on X.
The event presumably needs to be held outdoors because Tesla has been working on integrating cold gas thrusters from SpaceX that are supposed to make the Roadster fly in some capacity.
This reveal has been delayed many times before, and Musk has pushed it for months altogether before this scheduled date. At one point, Musk even planned to hold the event on April Fools’ day of this year. He said during Tesla’s annual meeting in 2025 — the same one where he was awarded a $1 trillion pay package — that an April Fools’ day event would offer him “some deniability” if it got delayed again.
“Like, I could say I was just kidding,” he said at the time.
Tesla first showed off its concept of a second-generation Roadster in 2017 at an event where it debuted the Semi, the company’s electric big rig. The new-look roadster was supposed to be the first supercar the company designed from the ground up, as the original Roadster, which got the company its start in the early 2010s, was largely based on the Lotus Elise.
At the time, Tesla promised the new Roadster was just a few years away. It collected $50,000 deposits from prospective customers of the car, which had an estimated base price of around $200,000. Some people even paid the company $250,000 to reserve one of 1,000 “Founders Series” versions of the supercar.
The project languished for years, until Musk reportedly tasked the Tesla team with redesigning the second-generation Roadster, and committed to the idea of using the SpaceX thrusters.
The promise of something outrageous like a flying car hasn’t been enough to tame critics of Musk and Tesla. Last year, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote on X that “7.5 years has felt like a long time to wait” for his own new Roadster, though Musk claimed Altman had gotten a refund.
Much like the Roadster will be at this event, the ship date for the vehicle is up in the air. Musk himself has said he expects it to take a year or more before the new Roadster goes into production after it is finally revealed.
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