China's jobs squeeze: 53M now deliver or drive
Two stories this morning show AI colliding with the real economy from opposite ends: millions of Chinese workers absorbing manufacturing automation as gig drivers, and investors pouring money into securing the AI systems companies are rushing into production.
More than 53 million people in China were working as food-delivery or ride-hailing drivers as of 2025 — up roughly 10 million in two years — according to new Financial Times analysis, as a slumping construction sector and accelerating automation in manufacturing push workers off formal payrolls and onto gig platforms.
The FT frames the platform economy as a precarious shock absorber: stable factory and construction jobs are disappearing faster than the economy can create formal replacements, so delivery and ride-hailing have become the de facto safety net for displaced labor. The automation driver is the part that should worry every industrial economy. China is running the largest live experiment in what happens when machines take the factory jobs — and the displaced workers don't vanish from the statistics, they show up in the gig economy, where a shock absorber that takes in 10 million new drivers in two years eventually stops absorbing. The takeaway for the rest of the world: the first visible cost of factory automation may not be unemployment lines but saturated, low-wage platform work.
Mindgard, the London- and Boston-based AI security startup, raised $30 million in a Series A led by Album VC to expand its automated red-teaming platform for models, agents, and AI applications.
The Lancaster University spinout says its platform — covering shadow-AI discovery, red teaming, and runtime protection — has uncovered more than 150 publicly disclosed vulnerabilities in widely used AI products, including a zero-day code-execution flaw in the Cursor IDE, a trusted-workspace bug in Google Antigravity, and guardrail failures in ChatGPT's image generation. The round, which brings total funding to about $42 million, lands as enterprises move AI into production faster than security tooling designed for it, and it follows a run of big defensive-cyber raises this month. The pattern is clear: as agents get real access to company systems, "secure your AI" is becoming its own budget line.
What to watch: whether Beijing's policy response to gig saturation moves beyond rhetoric, and whether the AI-security funding wave starts consolidating.
Is the gig economy a real safety net for workers displaced by automation, or just a holding pen? Tell us in the comments.
