Is AI Leaving the Python Community Behind?
I just returned from EuroPython. It was my first time attending, and honestly, one of the best PyCons I’ve been to. Big shoutout to organisers!
During the event, I joined a Community Organisers Open Space. Python event organisers came together to share their experiences. One issue came up again and again: sponsorship. While the PSF(Python Software Foundation) offers grants to support events, those grants are made possible by funding from other sponsors. It is not really a sponsor but rather a financial aid for events.
When the pandemic hit, many events vanished. The ones that survived are now rebuilding—slowly, and with greater difficulty. Volunteers are back. But finding sponsors is harder than ever. In 2025 alone, the tech industry has seen major layoffs. In April, 23,000 people lost their jobs.
Sponsorship budgets have been slashed. Job openings are fewer. And yet, the tech industry isn’t disappearing. It’s shifting.
The AI Shift
Companies rely more on AI. To cut costs, they reduce teams in customer experience, marketing, and junior engineering. VC money follows. AI startups are booming.
In Europe alone, AI companies received 25% of the regional venture capital—around €13.7 billion.(Source)
OpenAI raised $40 billion in April 2025. Anthropic raised $3.5 billion in February.
So it’s no surprise that AI talks are flooding PyCon events like it’s a gold rush. Every other session is about LangChain, LLM wrappers, fine-tuning, vector stores… sprinkled with “Look what I built with OpenAI!”
And yes, it’s cool tech. Yes, people are curious. But the imbalance is real.
PyCon is becoming a free talent expo for companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and other AI players. Developers demo projects built on OpenAI’s APIs. But we’re not seeing any support from OpenAI to our community events.
Python is the language that powered the rise of modern AI. It’s readable, beginner-friendly and the foundation of everything from pandas to PyTorch.
More than that, it’s been a refuge. A bridge into tech for the self-taught, the underrepresented, the curious, the career-changers. A language you could learn on a $200 laptop with no degree and a passion to learn. OpenAI rode Python to the moon and back.
And yet… the community that built this foundation gets crumbs.
The Sponsorship Void
Despite the thriving investment in AI companies. Many AI companies has yet sponsored any Python related events.
Not PyCon US.
Not EuroPython.
Not regional PyCons in Asia, Africa, LATAM.
Not PyLadiesCon.
Meanwhile, companies like Meta, Google, Microsoft, and NVIDIA still show up and support. OpenAI and Anthropic were not sponsors for any events. However, organisers continue to receive AI talks promoting the rise of the technology.
These sessions help them recruit, market, and refine their platforms—without a booth, without a badge, without a budget.
So who’s footing the bill?
- Community organizers working unpaid nights and weekends.
- Local Python communities hustling for sponsors.
- Contributors burning out maintaining the libraries powering these AI demos run on (FastAPI, NumPy, Pandas, etc.)
The AI Talk Takeover
Go to any Python conference now and you’ll find yourself in a flood of AI demos like: “Build an app with AI in 10 minutes!”
“Automate your job with LangChain!”
“Fine-tune an LLM without understanding details!”
These talks dominate the CFPs (Call for Proposals). Most tell the same story: how AI helped them build faster. It’s not that AI talks are bad. They’re exciting, cutting-edge, and genuinely useful. But when they dominate the program, we have a problem.
We are promoting their tools. Training their future hires.Boosting their market reach.
And the community pays for it in time, in money, in space that could have gone to talks on accessibility, teaching, documentation, or mentorship.
The Disappearing Juniors
Python has always welcomed developers at every stage.
Free tutorials, kind mentors, open source projects, this is how we grow new talent and help them move from junior to senior. But companies now want “AI-savvy” devs who can prompt, not build.
Entry-level roles are fading. Junior developers are struggling to find jobs. Companies automate beginner-level work and skip hiring juniors.
The work that used to teach them bug fixes, testing, small feature development is getting handed to large language models or skipped entirely.
Yes, senior engineers are still in demand. But if no one hires juniors, who will become seniors? We’re also losing something more human.
Mentorship moments. Peer review. The conversations that spark growth.
Juniors used to build CLI tools, write scrapers, and tinker with real projects. Now? “Just ask ChatGPT.” Learning is becoming synthetic too.
Instead of learning to think, they’re told to let the model think for them.
Juniors are told to “just ask the model” instead of being taught how to think.
Even worse, we’re cheering this on. Using Python. At Python events.
We’re unknowingly cheering systems that push our peers out of jobs.
We are creating a top-heavy ecosystem that worships speed and scale while starving the base. That base includes juniors, career changers, self-taught devs, and people from non-traditional paths. The very people Python has always welcomed with open arms.
So yeah, it’s not just about sponsorship.
It’s about values.
It’s about sustainability.
It’s about the long-term health of our community.
How Can We Change That?
Python isn’t a product. It’s a community.
Communities survive through contribution, care, and reciprocity.
If you’re a conference organiser, we should look deeper when selecting talks. Ask:
- Who benefits from this session?
- Is it education for the community, or free promotion for a corporate API?
If a talk helps people grow, teaches something real, and uplifts our ecosystem - yes, yes, yes. But if it only sells hype, maybe we hit pause.
We’ve also seen few engineers from OpenAI or similar companies submit talks to help the community learn.
We’re not asking for charity.
We’re asking for integrity.
We, the community, need to talk about this loudly and bravely.
A Call to AI Companies
If your business depends on Python, then help sustain it.
- Sponsor the events that built your ecosystem
- Fund the maintainers who keep it running
- Invest in training and roles for junior engineers.
- Support PyCons, PyLadies, and the global Python community
Python is one of the largest and most active open-source communities in the world. And it helped build the future of AI. Now AI must help secure Python’s future too.
If you’re an organiser, a speaker, or a mentor, ask yourself:
- Whose story are we telling?
- Whose future are we shaping?
- Are we building a community that welcomes—or one that extracts?
We built this ecosystem. We use our volunteered time to contribute to the growth of the community.
We give back what we’ve learned, so others can climb too.
It’s okay to ask more from those who benefit.
If Python helped launch AI, then it’s time for AI to help sustain Python.
P.S: I speak only from where I stand, with love for the people who make this real.