Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei repeated his prediction that AI could wipe out nearly half of entry level white collar jobs and push unemployment to 10 to 20 percent in the next five years. Amodei says that without any intervention, there could be a significant impact of AI on jobs and that it could happen faster than anything seen with previous technologies.
Ever since Amodei claimed earlier this year that AI could lead to widespread job loss, there has been a growing debate in the field, with some tech leaders supporting the idea while others like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman rejecting it.
In a recent interaction with CBS News, Amodei repeated his assertion on job loss and even named some of the professions that could be affected.
“If we look at entry level consultants, lawyers, financial professionals, you know, many of the white collar service industries, a lot of what they do, you know, AI models are already quite good at. And without intervention, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be some significant job impact there. And my worry is that it will be broad, and it will be faster than what we’ve seen with previous technology,” Amodei said.
“We do know that this is coming incredibly quickly. And I think the worst version of outcomes would be we knew there was going to be this incredible transformation, and people didn’t have enough of an opportunity to adapt,” he added.
Amodei also noted that a lack of transparency about the risks of AI models could lead to repeating the failures seen with cigarette or opioid companies that knew their products were dangerous and did not talk about them or take steps to prevent harm.
Notably, just a few days back, a high profile DeepSeek researcher had also predicted that AI could take over many of the jobs done by humans in the next few decades.
The researcher, Chen Deli, speaking at a conference in China, said AI could be helpful to humans in the short term, but it could threaten jobs within a decade.
“In the next 10 to 20 years, AI could take over the rest of the work humans perform and society could face a massive challenge, so at the time tech companies need to take the role of defender,” Deli said.
Will AI soon become smarter than humans?
When asked if he believes that AI will become smarter than humans, Amodei replied in the affirmative, stating, “I believe it will reach that level, that it will be smarter than most or all humans in most or all ways.”
He also noted that not everything about AI can be predicted, but Anthropic is “trying to predict everything we can.” He said the San Francisco based AI startup is worried about the economic impacts of AI, misuse of the models and even losing control of them.