I think Ford and the rest are using AI as an excuse to do a rank and yank - everybody is let go, then some are invited back. This isn’t anything new - Florida Power and Light (which is about 1/10th the size of Ford in terms of engineers) did this “fire everybody and make them reapply for jobs” thing back in the early 1990s. It’s a way of “cleaning house” without singling out the bad apples.