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New data backs parts of the Anthropic CEO\u2019s prediction. But the industry\u2019s response reveals a deeper problem.<\/p>\n
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In May 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. That prediction sparked a firestorm. When I spoke to experts about it, the pushback was swift<\/a>. Andy Thurai, field CTO at Cisco<\/a>, told me bluntly that \u201cThe AI providers \u2014 Anthropic, OpenAI, consultants \u2014 have to say extreme things to gain attention and instill FOMO.\u201d<\/p>\n Eight months later, Amodei is back and he\u2019s gone bigger, doubling down on his position. In late January, he published a 20,000-word essay titled \u201cThe Adolescence of Technology<\/a>,\u201d warning that AI systems smarter than Nobel laureates could arrive by 2027, that autonomous AI has already shown signs of deceiving its creators during testing and that AI-enabled dictatorships are a real possibility. He repeated the 50% jobs claim and called this moment humanity\u2019s \u201crite of passage.\u201d<\/p>\n But what\u2019s changed between then and now isn\u2019t exactly his warning. It\u2019s the context around it.<\/p>\n The Data Moved<\/p>\n When Amodei first made his prediction last year, the evidence was thin. But that has since shifted. An MIT study<\/a> published last November, using a simulation tool called the Iceberg Index, found that AI can already technically replace 11.7% of the U.S. labor market \u2014 roughly $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare and professional services. The visible disruption in tech layoffs accounts for just 2.2% of that exposure. The rest is building quietly beneath the surface, in HR, logistics and office administration.<\/p>\n The consulting firm Mercer reported<\/a> that 40% of employees now fear losing their jobs to AI<\/a>, up from 28% in 2024. IMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said at Davos<\/a> that AI is \u201chitting the labor market like a tsunami, and most countries and most businesses are not prepared for it.\u201d<\/p>\n So, without a doubt, parts of Amodei\u2019s thesis are landing and there seems to be an industry consensus about some of his concerns. But Amodei\u2019s timeline remains the sticking point.<\/p>\n The Credibility Gap<\/p>\n Amodei predicted in early 2025 that AI would be writing 90% of code within six months. That turned out to be true inside Anthropic, as the company\u2019s own Cowork tool was almost entirely written by Claude<\/a>. But across the broader software industry, the figure was 25% to 40%. For non-tech companies, it was even less. As Fortune\u2019s AI editor Jeremy Kahn wrote<\/a>, Amodei \u201cmay have a skewed sense for how quickly non-tech companies are actually able to adopt technology.\u201d<\/p>\n That pattern of seeing the future clearly from inside the lab but misjudging how fast it reaches everyone else matters. I think it\u2019s the difference between a useful warning and a self-serving one. Anthropic is valued at $350 billion. And, as Kahn noted, the essay reads as \u201cas much a novella-length marketing message as it is an impassioned prophecy.\u201d The solutions Amodei proposes \u2014 constitutional AI, interpretability research and safety-first development \u2014 map directly onto Anthropic\u2019s product roadmap.<\/p>\n At Davos, the skepticism was open. Scott Galloway, the NYU marketing professor and tech investor, argued<\/a> that every previous technological innovation had created more jobs than it destroyed. Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis put the probability<\/a> of human-level AI within the decade at just 50% \u2014 far more cautious than Amodei\u2019s one-to-two-year window. Deutsche Bank analysts warned that \u201cAI redundancy washing will be a significant feature of 2026,\u201d with companies blaming AI for cuts driven by other factors entirely.<\/p>\n An Industry Still Split<\/p>\n If Amodei\u2019s warning is a fire alarm, the industry\u2019s response looks less like an evacuation and more like a committee meeting about exit signs. The most immediate question his essay raises is simple: Whose job is it to act?<\/p>\n Josh Hart, co-founder and chief product and technology officer at YuLife<\/a>, argued that regulation is the wrong starting point entirely. \u201cWe can\u2019t simply regulate our way out of this transition,\u201d he said. \u201cThe music industry didn\u2019t beat piracy with lawsuits; they beat it with Spotify. We need to build an AI ecosystem so safe and convenient that the dangerous alternatives become obsolete.\u201d In Hart\u2019s view, the market will self-correct, if companies design better products.<\/p>\n Judah Taub, managing partner at Hetz Ventures<\/a>, sees the problem through a different lens. \u201cWhen even the CEOs of the biggest AI companies admit the future is \u2018cloudy,\u2019 and that they don\u2019t really know where this is heading, that should worry us,\u201d he said. Taub called for international rules comparable to nuclear nonproliferation agreements and tax structures that reward safer AI models \u2014 the kind of heavy coordination that markets alone have never produced.<\/p>\n Gil Perry, CEO of D-ID<\/a>, landed somewhere in between. \u201cThe next phase of AI<\/a> shouldn\u2019t be defined by extreme hype or crippling fear, but by accountability,\u201d he told me, arguing that trust needs to be built into products \u201cnot because of government regulations, but because of basic responsibility.\u201d It\u2019s a reasonable position. But it also depends entirely on companies policing themselves, which history suggests they tend to do right up until the moment it becomes expensive.<\/p>\n Eight months after Amodei first raised the alarm, the people closest to this technology still cannot agree on who should act, how, or when \u2014 and I think that\u2019s the real story here.<\/p>\n The Response So Far<\/p>\n Governments have started to respond meaningfully, with states like Illinois, Texas and Colorado<\/a> regulating how companies use AI in hiring decisions, focused on bias and transparency. But it addresses a different problem than the one Amodei is raising: What happens to the millions of workers whose roles don\u2019t get filled by biased algorithms but simply stop existing altogether?<\/p>\n Companies like HCLTech have trained over 100,000 employees<\/a> in generative AI, and the World Economic Forum<\/a> estimates that 1.1 billion jobs will need to be transformed by technology in the next decade. But according to Gartner<\/a>, 120 million workers globally are at risk of redundancy because they\u2019re unlikely to receive the reskilling they actually need.<\/p>\n What To Watch<\/p>\n The test case may already be in front of us. ServiceNow<\/a> CEO Bill McDermott vowed at Davos<\/a> not to lay off employees, even as his 30,000-person company deploys agentic AI to automate job functions. It was one of the strongest public commitments any major CEO has made on AI and jobs. But every quarter that AI capabilities improve and competitors cut headcount, that promise gets harder to keep.<\/p>\n McDermott\u2019s pledge is worth watching because it represents the exact tension Amodei\u2019s essay describes: A leader who sees what\u2019s coming and is trying to manage the transition responsibly, under pressure from a market that rewards speed over caution.<\/p>\n If a company of ServiceNow\u2019s size eventually reverses course, it won\u2019t just be one CEO breaking a promise. It will signal that the industry\u2019s informal approach to managing AI displacement \u2014 goodwill, voluntary commitments and case-by-case decisions \u2014 isn\u2019t holding.<\/p>\n Amodei has now sounded this alarm twice. The data behind it is stronger than it was eight months ago. And the industry\u2019s answer is still the same: We\u2019ll figure it out. That should concern us more than any single prediction about jobs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"New data backs parts of the Anthropic CEO\u2019s prediction. But the industry\u2019s response reveals a deeper problem. 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