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Artificial intelligence could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and cause US unemployment to spike as high as 20%, according to the chief executive of a top AI company.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, whose firm built the “Claude” AI chatbot, warned that executives and politicians should stop “sugar-coating” the mass layoffs that could occur in fields like tech, finance and law and be honest with workers about the extent of the threat.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios in a Wednesday interview. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
The Anthropic boss expects the job market bloodbath to play out over the next one to five years. At the same time, he expects AI to provide massive benefits to the economy and fuel unprecedented advancements in medicine.
“Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” said Amodei, describing one potential scenario.
At present, the national unemployment rate stands at 4.2%.
Amodei’s latest warning came even as Anthropic competes in a breakneck race with other tech giants like Google, Meta and OpenAI to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI – which describes an AI model with human-level cognitive capabilities or greater.
Amodei, who started Anthropic after previously working at OpenAI under its CEO Sam Altman, is one of several executives who have warned about impending upheaval in the job market.
Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed how AI was taking on a bigger role in Meta’s workforce.
“Probably in 2025, we at Meta, as well as the other companies that are basically working on this, are going to have an AI that can effectively be a sort of mid-level engineer that you have at your company that can write code,” Zuckerberg said during an appearance on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
Elsewhere, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned in April 2023 that he expected “knowledge workers,” such as writers, accountants, architects and software engineers, to be hit hard by the rise of AI.
