Latest news with #Amodei
New York Post
5 hours ago
- Business
- New York Post
CEO warns AI could wipe out 1 in 2 white collar jobs in next five years
The head of one of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence labs has warned the technology could eliminate half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years. Fresh off promoting his company's technology at a developer conference, Anthropic chief executive officer Dario Amodei told CNN's Anderson Cooper that politicians and businesses are not prepared for the spike in unemployment rates AI could prompt. Advertisement 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,' the 42-year-old said in an interview with Cooper. 'AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.' The technology that companies like his are building, Amodei said, could boost unemployment in America as high as 20 per cent by 2030. 3 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei claimed politicians and businesses are not prepared for the spike in unemployment rates that AI will cause. AP Advertisement Anthropic's AI can work nearly seven hours a day, he said, and has the skills typically required of entry-level corporate workers – 'the ability to summarise a document, analyse a bunch of sources and put it into a report, write computer code' – at the same standard 'as a smart college student'. 'We can see where the trend is going, and that's what's driving some of the concern [about AI in the workforce],' Amodei said. Though Amodei acknowledged it would 'definitely not [be] in my economic interest' to do so, he urged US politicians to consider implementing a tax on AI labs. He said he was 'raising the alarm' because his counterparts at other companies 'haven't as much and I think someone needs to say it and to be clear'. Advertisement 'It's eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don't think, are fully aware of what's going on,' he said. 3 A World Economic Forum survey found that 41 percent of employers intend to reduce their workforce because of AI automation by 2030. REUTERS In a separate interview with US publication Axios, Amodei said such workforce changes are 'going to happen in a small amount of time – as little as a couple of years or less'. 'Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced – and 20 percent of people don't have jobs,' he said. Advertisement 'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it.' In January, a World Economic Forum (WEF) survey found that 41 percent of employers intend to reduce their workforce because of AI automation by 2030. 'Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market – driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers,' the WEI said in a statement at the time. 'The presence of both graphic designers and legal secretaries just outside the top 10 fastest-declining job roles, a first-time prediction not seen in previous editions of the Future of Jobs Report, may illustrate GenAI's increasing capacity to perform knowledge work.' 3 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks,' Amodei said. Getty Images Closer to home, in December the Social Policy Group reported that without immediate intervention, one in three Australians in knowledge-based or manual roles were at risk of job loss by 2030. Conversely, the WEF found that close to 70 percent of companies plan to hire new workers with skills to design AI tools and enhancements, and 62 percent plan to hire more employees with skills to work alongside the technology. 'Now, you can hire one experienced worker, equip them with AI tooling, and they can produce the output of the junior worker on top of their own – without the overhead,' recruiter at US venture capital firm SignalFire, Heather Doshay, told Business Insider. Advertisement Doshay stressed that AI 'isn't stealing job categories outright – it's absorbing the lowest-skill tasks'. 'That shifts the burden to universities, boot camps, and candidates to level up faster,' she added. 'We can't just sleepwalk into it' Advertisement Amodei insisted AI can – and will – be used for good, noting he 'wouldn't be building this technology if I didn't think that it could make the world better'. 'We have to make sure that people have the ability to adapt, and that we adopt the right policies,' Amodei told CNN. 'We have to act now. We can't just sleepwalk into it … I don't think we can stop this bus. 'From the position that I'm in, I can maybe hope to do a little to steer the technology in a direction where we become aware of the harms, we address the harms, and we're still able to achieve the benefits.'
News18
6 hours ago
- Business
- News18
‘AI To Wipe Out Half Of Entry-Level Jobs': Trump ‘Silent', But Barack Obama Says...
Last Updated: Former US President Barack Obama's reaction came in response to an article that offers a blunt warning about the risks AI poses to the workforce. Former US President Barack Obama has raised concerns about the uncertain future that artificial intelligence (AI) could bring for jobs, especially white-collar ones. His reaction came in response to an article that offers a blunt warning about the risks AI poses to the workforce. Sharing the article on his X (formerly Twitter) account, he wrote, 'At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy and how we live." At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy, and how we live. — Barack Obama (@BarackObama) May 30, 2025 The article he shared, from features Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, who gives a stark warning to the US government. He said AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years and push unemployment to between 10 and 20 per cent. He urged both AI companies and the government to stop 'sugar-coating" what's coming. 'Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen. It sounds crazy and people just don't believe it," he said. Amodei explained how AI is no longer just helping workers by automating simple tasks but is starting to replace jobs in fields like technology, finance, law and consulting. He said, 'It's going to happen in a small amount of time—as little as a couple of years or less." Amodei is not alone who has raised the alarm. Steve Bannon, a top official during Trump's first term and host of the popular MAGA podcast 'War Room," says AI's impact on jobs is being ignored now but will become a big issue in the 2028 presidential campaign. 'I don't think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated," Bannon told the outlet. Meanwhile, Obama's post caught attention online with many users agreeing that the issue needs more attention. One user commented, 'Good to see a former president raise awareness of the storm that is coming." Another added, 'This is a big deal. There are many jobs for which it is trivial for AI to replace. A sober warming that needs to be taken seriously." 'Agreed. Although this narrative has been present before – including during the Industrial Revolution – and we managed through it. Maybe this time is different," a person remarked. An individual pointed out, 'Undoubtedly, there will be certain repercussions. However, it is crucial not to underestimate the resilience and adaptability of humanity. Throughout history, in the face of any emerging technology, humanity has consistently demonstrated its capacity to adjust and navigate new challenges." While Obama agreed with Amodei's concerns, this isn't the first time he has spoken about AI's impact on jobs. Back in April, during an event at Hamilton College in New York, he shared his thoughts on how AI could affect job security. He pointed out that roles involving routine tasks are at higher risk. According to him, advanced AI models can code better than '60 per cent, 70 per cent of coders now." First Published:
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
The ‘white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine
A version of this story appeared in CNN Business' Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up. ICYMI: The 42-year-old billionaire Dario Amodei, who runs the AI firm Anthropic, told Axios this week that the technology he and other companies are building could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs … sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years, he said. He reiterated that claim in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday. 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it,' Amodei told Cooper. 'AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.' To be clear, Amodei didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate. And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us. In this as-yet fictional world, 'cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don't have jobs,' Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say. (As an aside: I asked labor economist Aaron Sojourner about this scenario of high unemployment plus strong economic growth, and he said there is a theory of the case, if you squint really hard. Amodei may believe that AI can increase productivity and make each hour of labor create more goods and services. But if that's the case, he's imagining 'a 30% jump in labor productivity to get that combination of unemployment and GDP growth,' said Sojourner, a senior researcher at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. 'That is a wildly unprecedented vision,' he added, noting that in the 1980s and 90s, computer adoption gave the world all kinds of tools that reshaped the labor market. But labor productivity grew just 2% to 3%.) Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed Amodei's economic prediction as a 'white-collar bloodbath.' Even some AI optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. 'Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation, wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. 'They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment.' Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amodei stands to profit off the very technology he claims will gut the labor market. But here he is, telling everyone the truth and sounding the alarm! He's trying to warn us, he's one of the good ones! Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic's whole ~thing.~ It refers to itself primarily as an 'AI safety and research' company. They are the AI guys who see the potential harms of AI clearly — not through the rose-colored glasses worn by the techno-utopian simps over at OpenAI. (In fact, Anthropic's founders, including Amodei, left OpenAI over ideological differences.) Look, I want to live a cancer-free utopia where I only have to work a few hours a week and there's no poverty and stuff just works. But do I believe that generative AI is the key to unlocking that fantasyland? I do not. And no tech pioneers have proven their case. Generative AI from large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are really good at some very specific stuff: They can summarize documents, write dumb emails, help kids cheat on their homework, and even recommend summer reading lists so obscure not even the authors knew they'd written them. Heck, they could probably generate this newsletter and mimic my voice. But they hit their limits fast. They hallucinate. They get basic facts wrong. They are susceptible manipulation. (And those are all things we human beings can do just fine on our own.) If AI companies can take these handy, quasi-reliable text predictors and turn them into an economic revolution, fine. But that seems so far off in the future that Amodei's warnings feel more like an ad than a PSA. It's on them to show their work: Show us how AI could be so destructive and how Anthropic can fix it — rather than just shouting about the risks. . Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Tom's Guide
a day ago
- Business
- Tom's Guide
Anthropic CEO claims AI will cause mass unemployment in the next 5 years — here's why
In recent months, multiple companies have taken strong stances on choosing AI over new employees, signalling a major change in the job market. And, according to one of AI's biggest CEOs, things are only going to get worse. In an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, 'AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it.' 'AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do.' Anthropic is the company behind Claude — one of the biggest and most popular AI models in the world right now. The company recently launched its latest version of the system, known as Claude 4 Sonnet and Opus. Our own testing (and comparisons against ChatGPT) convinced us Anthropic's newest model is one of the best AI systems to date. In a separate interview with Axios, Amodei explained his beliefs that AI tools could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs and boost unemployment to as much as 20% within the next five years. Experts and researchers have been telling us this for years now, so why is this any different? As the CEO of Anthropic, Amodei is right in the eye of the storm. While AI has already proved its abilities in creative formats like writing, as well as image and video generation, it's the next frontier that is concerning. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has stated that he wants AI to do half of Meta's coding by 2026 and Microsoft's CEO Satya Nadella said as much as 30% of his company's code is currently being completed by AI. Get instant access to breaking news, the hottest reviews, great deals and helpful tips. This is all part of AI's latest party trick. Across all of the major AI models, the ability to deal with code has grown exponentially. Not only can these models code based purely on prompts, but for those more experienced in programming, it can check through their work, drop in pre-made blocks and take on time-intensive tasks like debugging. This could render a large number of jobs in the coding industry obsolete, but also shows a movement of AI into complicated thought patterns, able to complete multiple steps in a tasks. During his interview, Amodei said Anthropic tracks the number of people who say they use its AI models to build on human jobs versus those entirely automating those jobs. This is something that has before held the system back from taking on more jobs, only able to complete tasks within the confines of a chatbot or generator. During his interview, Amodei said Anthropic tracks the number of people who say they use its AI models to build on human jobs versus those entirely automating those jobs. Currently, it's about 60% of people using AI for augmentation and 40% for automation. However, that replacement number is growing and it is a trend being seen in some of the largest companies like Shopify and Duolingo. With artificial intelligence tools expanding faster than regulators can move, it's highly likely this will become an ever-increasing topic for society to grapple with. In the midst of all of it, Amodei's advice for the average person is what you'd expect: learn to use AI.
Axios
a day ago
- Business
- Axios
Ready or not, AI is starting to replace people
Businesses are racing to replace people with AI, and they're not waiting to first find out whether AI is up to the job. Why it matters: CEOs are gambling that Silicon Valley will improve AI fast enough that they can rush cutbacks today without getting caught short-handed tomorrow. While AI tools can often enhance office workers' productivity, in most cases they aren't yet adept, independent or reliable enough to take their places. But AI leaders say that's imminent — any year now! — and CEOs are listening. State of play: If these execs win their bets, they'll have taken the lead in the great AI race they believe they're competing in. But if they lose and have to backtrack, as some companies already are doing, they'll have needlessly kicked off a massive voluntary disruption that they will regret almost as much as their discarded employees do. Driving the news: AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios' Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen this week. Amodei argues the industry needs to stop "sugar-coating" this white-collar bloodbath — a mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs. Yes, but: Many economists anticipate a less extreme impact. They point to previous waves of digital change, like the arrival of the PC and the internet, that arrived with predictions of job-market devastation that didn't pan out. Other critics argue that AI leaders like Amodei have a vested interest in playing up the speed and size of AI's impact to justify raising the enormous sums the technology requires to build. By the numbers: Unemployment among recent college grads is growing faster than among other groups and presents one early warning sign of AI's toll on the white collar job market, according to a new study by Oxford Economics. Looking at a three-month moving average, the jobless rate for those ages 22 to 27 with a bachelor's degree was close to 6% in April, compared to just above 4% for the overall workforce. Between the lines: Several companies that made early high-profile announcements that they would replace legions of human workers with AI have already had to reverse course. Klarna, the buy now-pay later company, set out in 2023 to be OpenAI's "favorite guinea pig" for testing how far a firm could go at using AI to replace human workers — but earlier this month it reversed course, and rehiring support workers because customers want the option of talking to a real person. IBM predicted in 2023 that it would soon be able to replace around 8000 jobs with AI. Two years later, its CEO told the Wall Street Journal that so far the company has replaced a couple of hundred HR employees with AI — but increased hiring of software developers and salespeople. Zoom out: Every modern era of technological transformation has disrupted the labor market, from the Industrial Revolution of the early 19th century to the assembly-line automation of the early 20th and the container ship-driven globalization of the millennium. The transitions have often been rough but economies emerged bigger and with more jobs, not less. Some AI experts fear the change could be so much faster with AI that there will be no time to adapt. Others view AI as a fundamentally different kind of tech that will force society to invent new approaches to jobs and salaries, like the notion of a universal basic income. Our thought bubble: Predicting employment levels has always been tough because there are so many complex variables to consider. Even if Amodei is right and AI cuts a devastating swath among office workers, there are other demographic forces at work that could make it harder for businesses to find the human workers they still need. For instance: The largest generation in history is retiring as Boomers age out of the workforce. The Trump administration is working overtime to limit immigration. Other black-swan crises will erupt that could boost or limit unemployment. What we're watching: The sociopolitical skews of AI's workforce impact are volatile and hold a great potential for splitting coalitions and dividing allies. The populist wing of Trump's MAGA movement is likely to resist AI-driven change even as the president's tech-insurgent allies push for more investment and weaker regulation. More broadly, Americans overall say that, unlike impatient CEOs and China-fearing office-holders, they want to see AI introduced with more care and less haste, per the 2025 Axios Harris 100 poll.
