6 days ago
Top AI CEO Warns Lawmakers To Prepare For Tech To Gut These Entry-Level Office Jobs
Dario Amodei, CEO of leading artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, warns that AI may eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment within the next five years if lawmakers and companies don't do anything about it now.
'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,' Amodei told Axios. 'It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it.'
Amodei told Axios politicians and companies can still prepare and protect Americans from job cuts in a range of entry level white-collar fields including technology, finance, law, consulting and more.
'We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,' Amodei told the outlet. 'I don't think this is on people's radar.'
Amodei's warning came a week after Anthropic launched its newest Amazon-backedAI model Claude Opus 4, which is used for complex, long-running coding tasks. It's currently released under specific safety measures after testing raised concerns over the tool's capabilities.
For instance, Anthropic revealed in a safety report that Claude Opus 4 had sometimes taken 'extremely harmful actions' in test scenarios such as blackmailing engineers who posed a threat in taking it down.
Anthropic co-founder and chief scientist Jared Kaplan also told Time magazine that their tests revealed the AI model could potentially teach people how to produce biological weapons.
'You could try to synthesize something like COVID or a more dangerous version of the flu — and basically, our modeling suggests that this might be possible,' Kaplan said.
Amodei's warning focuses on the economic impact of AI models like his, but says there's still time to mitigate his worst-case scenario from happening.
The CEO suggests raising awareness, creating a joint committee on AI or formally briefing all lawmakers on the technology, encouraging workers to use AI to augment their tasks, and begin debating policy solutions for an economy dominated by AI.
One policy the CEO recommends is a 'token tax,' which taxes whatever money the AI company makes every time someone uses its model.
'Obviously, that's not in my economic interest,' Amodei said. 'But I think that would be a reasonable solution to the problem.'
Amodei is not the first executive to warn of AI's potential consequences.
Nvidia's Jensen Huang told an audience at the Milken Institute's Global Conference earlier this month that 'you're not going to lose your job to an AI, but you're going to lose your job to someone who uses AI,' CNBC reports.
LinkedIn's Aneesh Raman warned young workers in an op-ed published in The New York Times that AI also poses a real threat to their entry-level jobs, saying 'virtually all jobs will experience some impacts, but office jobs are expected to feel the biggest crunch.'
'You can't just step in front of the train and stop it,' Amodei told Axios. 'The only move that's going to work is steering the train — steer it 10 degrees in a different direction from where it was going. That can be done. That's possible, but we have to do it now.'
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