AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs: Anthropic CEO
VIRGINIA, UNITED STATES — Artificial intelligence could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and send the United States unemployment rate as high as 20% within the next five years, according to Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI chatbot.
Amodei’s warning is aimed at both business leaders and policymakers, urging them to be upfront about the looming upheaval in sectors such as technology, finance, and law.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told Axios. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
He stressed that the potential for massive layoffs is real and imminent, with the job market facing turmoil in the near future. Currently, the national unemployment rate sits at 4.2%.
Tech titans racing toward AGI
Amodei’s warning comes amid fierce competition among tech giants Google, Meta, and OpenAI, all striving to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI), which would match or surpass human cognitive abilities.
Amodei, a former employee of OpenAI under CEO Sam Altman, is one of several industry leaders raising concerns about the impending disruption to the labor market.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently stated that by 2025, his company and others will likely have AI capable of performing as a mid-level engineer, writing code and handling complex programming tasks.
“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 on ‘The Joe Rogan Experience’ podcast.
Balancing economic gains with job displacement
Amodei also acknowledges the immense benefits AI could bring, including breakthroughs in medicine and rapid economic growth. “Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people don’t have jobs,” Amodei said, outlining one possible scenario.
Other leaders, such as Google CEO Sundar Pichai, have also warned that “knowledge workers”—writers, accountants, architects, and software engineers—will be particularly affected by AI’s rise.
However, Pichai and others remain optimistic that new jobs and industries will emerge, even as traditional roles are upended.
As the tech industry races forward, Amodei insists that transparency and preparation are critical. “We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” he said.
