OpenAI's Sam Altman and Anthropic's Dario Amodei walk back earlier warnings about AI causing mass job losses

Sam Altman told Commonwealth Bank CEO Matt Comyn: "I'm delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened." Last June, Altman had warned that entire job categories could vanish; Dario Amodei called half of all white-collar jobs at risk.

Amodei now frames automation as a productivity multiplier: "If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job" — which then scales back to 100 percent and boosts productivity tenfold.

The Yale Budget Lab has found no major shifts in jobs most exposed to AI so far. A separate study shows the job crisis among coders, writers, and other AI-exposed workers started before ChatGPT launched, suggesting direct AI job apocalypse narratives don't hold up at this point.