AI could cut half of all entry-level white collar jobs: Anthropic CEO
Dario Amodei
has openly voiced what many people are fearing: artificial intelligence (AI) could eat away nearly half of all
entry-level white collar jobs
, and soon.
Amodei, who leads one of the world's largest AI companies, has warned that significant job cuts could occur within five years, urging consumers and US lawmakers to prepare, according to Axios.
He also criticised the government and other AI companies for "sugar-coating" the coming reality: the potential for mass job eliminations across various white-collar professions, particularly at the entry level, including technology, finance, law, and consulting.
"Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, people just don't believe it," he said.
Amodei is at the helm of the very technology he predicts will bring about the job cuts, and says he is speaking out about this in the hope that the government will heed the warning and protect the nation.
A 'jobs' bloodbath
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Amodei spoke out about the fears of artificial intelligence after demonstrating the ability of his company's latest AI models, under the Claude 4 family. Claude Opus 4, one of the company's chatbots in this family, was in the news after its launch as it exhibited alarming behaviour during safety tests by threatening to blackmail its engineer after being informed it would be replaced.
This comes as OpenAI, Google and other major AI firms rapidly enhance their
large language models
(LLMs), enabling them to increasingly match and surpass human performance across a range of tasks.
The report cited Anthropic research, which shows that people still view AI as something that will help them do their job, and not necessarily replace them to do it. But Amodei warns that the use of AI in companies will move more and more towards automation in "as little as a couple of years or less".
Hundreds of companies are already producing agents to automate a significant chunk of their gruntwork. AI agents can take on the work of humans and finish it much quicker, for a fraction of the cost.
Meta Technologies CEO Mark Zuckerberg had told host Joe Rogan on his podcast that his company is working on making AI a mid-level engineer that can write code. Separately, the company announced plans to lay off 5% of its workforce.
Meta is not alone. Big Tech and other conglomerates in the US are laying off workers. Microsoft is cutting 6,000 staff, many of them engineers. Cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike slashed 5% of its workforce and Walmart is reportedly cutting 1,500 corporate jobs.
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