Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warns AI may see ‘painful’ jobs disruption
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 04: Anthropic Co-Founder and CEO Dario Amodei speaks during the “How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Business in the Next 18 Months” panel at the INBOUND 2025 event powered by HubSpot at Moscone Center on September 4, 2025 in San Francisco, California. (Photo: Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot)
Chance Yeh | Getty Images Entertainment | Getty Images
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has issued a new warning about how AI will disrupt the job market, saying it will cause “unusually painful” disruption.
The AI chief, who co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela Amodei in 2021 and was behind the creation of AI chatbot Claude, warned last year that AI would wipe out half of all white-collar jobs. The issue has divided opinion among business and technology leaders. Amodei’s warning was requested Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang says “He thinks AI is very scary, but it’s only [Anthropic] should do this.”
Amodei published a nearly 20,000-word article on Monday. Risks posed by artificial intelligence It is not taken seriously and it is warned that technology will create a bigger “shock” in the job market than ever before.
Amodei laid out what he sees as potential harms of AI, including the technology becoming autonomous and unpredictable, bad actors or terrorist groups using it to create biological weapons, and some countries leveraging AI to gain disproportionate power, creating a “global totalitarian dictatorship.”
“Almost unimaginable power is about to be delivered to humanity, and it is extremely uncertain whether our social, political, and technological systems are mature enough to wield this power,” Amodei wrote.
In the article, he detailed his argument that it will be difficult for people to recover from the impact of artificial intelligence on the labor market in the short term.
“New technologies often bring shocks to the labor market, and in the past people have always survived these shocks, but I worry that this is because these previous shocks affected only a small fraction of all possible human capabilities, leaving people room to expand into new tasks,” Amodei said.
“I worry that AI will have much more far-reaching and much faster-emerging effects, and so it will be much harder to make sure things go well,” he added.
short term shock
Amodei predicted that humans will not be able to adapt to the rapid pace of AI development, which will trigger an “unusually painful” short-term shock to the labor market.
“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence is much faster than in previous technological revolutions,” he wrote. “It is difficult for people to adapt to this pace of change, both due to changes in how a particular business operates and the need to move to new businesses.”
This, he said, was largely because AI’s “cognitive breadth” meant it would not impact one industry, but could simultaneously eliminate jobs in finance, consulting, law and technology, denying workers the option of “switching lanes” to another sector where their skills are compatible.
“Technology does not replace a single job, but acts as a ‘general labor substitute for humans,'” Amodei wrote.
According to Amodei, tackling this problem will “require government intervention” such as “progressive taxation” specifically targeting AI firms.
NVIDIA President and CEO Jensen Huang attends the 56th annual World Economic Forum (WEF) meeting in Davos, Switzerland, on January 21, 2026.
Denis Balibouse | Reuters
Artificial intelligence’s job elimination dominated the headlines last year. Technology was almost cited as the reason 55,000 layoffs in the US in 2025, according to December data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.
A November study from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology found that AI could currently do the jobs of 11.7% of the U.S. labor market and save up to $1.2 trillion in wages in finance, healthcare and other professional services.
Consultancy firm Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide, found that employees fear losing their jobs to artificial intelligence; this rate increased from 28% to 40% in 2024.
But “cleaning up AI redundancies will be a key feature of 2026,” Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note last week, as major companies blame technology for layoffs that actually had other reasons.
Yale University Budget Lab said: In the October report According to an analysis of US labor market data from 2022 to 2025, artificial intelligence has not yet caused widespread job losses. It found that the share of workers in different jobs has not changed significantly since the launch of ChatGPT in November sparked increased interest in AI.
Others are seeing job creation in blue-collar industries, such as: Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said AI will actually “create a lot of jobs” for plumbers, electricians, construction workers and those building AI-related factories.
“And we’re talking six-figure salaries for people building chip factories, computer factories, or AI factories,” he added.
JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon He shared a similar view at the World Economic Forum last week, saying governments should step in “at the local level” and provide incentives for firms to retrain people and provide income assistance while AI takes over some jobs.
