AI jobs danger: Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath – “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told us. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic
27 Comments
From the article
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, one of the world’s most powerful creators of [artificial intelligence](https://www.axios.com/technology/automation-and-ai) — has a blunt, scary warning for the U.S. government and all of us:
* AI could wipe out *half* of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years, Amodei told us in an interview from his San Francisco office.
* Amodei said AI companies and government need to stop “sugar-coating” what’s coming: the possible mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions, especially entry-level gigs.
**Why it matters:** [Amodei](https://www.darioamodei.com/), 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.
**Few are paying attention.** Lawmakers don’t get it or don’t believe it. CEOs are afraid to talk about it. Many workers won’t realize the risks posed by the possible job apocalypse — until after it hits.
* “Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” Amodei told us. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
**The big picture:** President Trump has been quiet on the job risks from AI. But Steve Bannon — a top official in Trump’s first term, whose “War Room” is one of the most powerful MAGA podcasts — says AI job-killing, which gets virtually no attention now, will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.
* “I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” Bannon told us.
Just another “AI” CEO overselling their capabilities to get more market traction.
What we are about to see is many companies making people redundant, and having to employ most of them back 3 quarters after realising they are damaging their bottomline.
No doubt many of the comments here are going to dismiss this as AI hype. However the fact is that AI capabilities have advanced much faster than predicted over the past decade, and the tech is almost certainly going to continue progressing. It’s only going to get better from here.
It’s absolutely fair to disagree about the timeline, but recent history would suggest that we’re more likely to underestimate capabilities rather than overestimate. Unless there’s something truly magical and impossible to replicate happening in the human brain (and there isn’t) true AI is coming. I’d say that we’re completely unprepared for it.
These AI articles are a dime a dozen on stoking sales and fear, but sometimes they’re not wrong. AI won’t kill every job, this guy is saying very specifically that they’ll kill entry level jobs, and fuck yes they will. I use an AI to code with right now, it does what an entry level coder would do way faster and more efficiently.
Does that make it good or acceptable that we’re losing those positions? No, but it is going to happen, it is happening. And I don’t know how businesses will handle it, because it requires thinking further ahead than one quarter. If businesses kill entry level works, they won’t get senior workers, then there won’t be any left. Meanwhile profits will spike as lay offs climb because entry level jobs are getting slaughtered, but in 10, 20 years, when those same companies need senior level employees that they won’t have, can’t have because they don’t exist because those workers won’t have opportunities for jobs that would get them to that position?
I mean fuck it already happens “Need junior level developer with 5 years experience.” It’s about to get so much more ridiculous this ouroboros of profit and greed is going to eat itself alive.
Notice how this is solely directed at entry level positions. Rich people stick together, they want to protect each other while simultaneously picking up all the ladders behind them. Fuck em
One of the first jobs to be taken with be sensationalist news reporting
the photographers, designers, programmers and 1st level service call centers see the effect since two years. layoffs or if self employed: less contracts or less money. of cours not all are wiped out yet and maybe “only” 70% will be effected. but if you have friends working in this area you see this already happening.
yes, it’s not as good as humans work.. today. many ppl at reddit refuse to accept thar chatgpt is _not_ 5 years old and now you get nearl bug free videos from _a different company_.
so: yes, ppl don’t see how fast things are changing around them. and yes, ppl don’t understand how easy some jobs (lawyers, laboratory etc) can be replaced in the next 2-5 years.
It’s partly hype but not unrealistic. Companies will have to pay a hellish premium for a AI license with human skills though. And the f**kups will be hillarious/terrifying to watch.
We can remove C levels, including CEO, you know, with “AI”.
Some of the timelines and predictions are ridiculous but if you are dismissing this you are being way too cynical.
I’m a software dev and right now the tools aren’t great. Too many hallucinations, too many mistakes. I don’t use them often since my job is extremely sensitive to mistakes, but I have them ready to use if needed.
But these tools can code in some capacity – it’s not fake. It’s not bullshit. And that wasn’t possible just a few years ago.
If you are outright dismissive, you’re basically standing in front of the biggest corporations in the world with the most money and essentially a blank check from the most powerful governments, they’re loading a huge new shiny cannon in your face and you’re saying ‘go ahead, shoot me’. You should be screaming for them to stop, or running away, or at least asking them to chill out. This isn’t the time to call bluffs.
This could also result in a way to review salaries and cut them drastically, AI would become an easy excuse to force employees to bend.
If this is correct, and I don’t know if it is or not, I don’t know this shit…what is the endgame here? Who are the companies trying to automate everything going to sell their shit to if everyone is unemployed because a robot took their job? Is it just some myopic, not looking at the big picture shit? Make it make sense.
This fucking guy again… salesman trying to get more investors
Man who has a vested interest in getting people to believe in AI, tries to get you to believe in AI.
Maybe, just maybe the employees should be transparent on plans to replace folks with AI or what the future holds for employees. Instead we see layoffs in the thousands and barely a warning or notice was given. We need a fundamental change in the employee/employeer structure but it feels like it is sadly too late.
every one here is talking about white collar jobs and how theyre not going anywhere. which i believe they 100% are on the chopping block, but lets forget that. , truck driving is one of the most common jobs in the U.S., with the profession ranking as the **top job in 29 states**. is there anyone here who seriously thinks this job is safe. the job that is 95% of the time on the highway. Automated trucks can drive for longer hours, for less cost per mile, and is already trying to be on the road. If they just left the last 10 miles up to the human, it would still wreck the economy as we know it. there is no other industry that can absorb them. Its gonna be the death of a thousand cuts. a tiny job here, a couple employees there. but with each dollar lost. we lose the multiplier effect. You as an individual loses 80k on average, but the economy will lose 300k. and it snowballs from there. no one is ready.
Whether you think AI will take jobs or not, I dont think it changes what needs to be done at a personal level. If you think that AI is coming to replace jobs then you need to start developing skill sets that will help you generate income in the future (this could also be learning a craft if you’re white collar for example).
If you think AI is overhyped and nothing will happen – well I dont think there is anything wrong with planning for a scenario where you’re wrong. I mean it’s either you sit around and think nothing is going to happen or you try to do something about it and even if nothing happens you would of gained a new skill set or something along those lines.
Personally, I think AI will touch almost every part of society in a meaningful way and I work in this field. People are being too narrow in this conversation about replacing jobs. For example, what if you change a job and replace capabilities? This would still reduce the number of jobs. Even now AI is really good in very specific and controlled environments with guard rails… so what you can do is take those roles out of wider job roles and automate those functions and reduce the need for as many people.
Also it’s not that people are underestimating AI, people are underestimating other people. There is too much collective effort to get this to work and too many feasible use cases (it’s not like we are trying to develop something deemed impossible) that there won’t be successful use outcomes. For people who use things even like LLMs they will know that the more clever their engagement and prompts the better the outcomes, just flip that from the perspective of developers and also allowing reasoning models to talk to each other with some clever hard coding on top.
So is AI, with all the money being spent on it each year, creating any jobs ? I mean hundreds of billions is paying for somethings or someones ?
Wow, who would’ve ever expected a clown ass CEO of an AI company to ever say how amazing AI is and how it’s going to take over the world. Ok bro, good luck with that.
As a historian of science and technology, and as someone who has been watching this closely, my prediction is that it will be jarring and in some ways uncomfortable but not as ruinous as the article predicts. We should also remember that the person in the article who’s ringing the alarm has a stake in the outcome he’s foreseeing.
Humanity has seen similar upheavals in past agricultural and industrial revolutions. The result was not so much that people were left destitute with no employment options but that they moved to adjacent jobs in the same field or sought training in other fields entirely. When the cotton gin was invented, more people became gin operators, which amplified their efforts.
A nagging bottleneck had been widened by a new form of mechanization.
A similar thing happened with mechanization in industry, in several stages of industrialization. People who previously did handiwork became equipment operators.
The difference with AI is that machines aren’t just streamlining the mechanical processes of work but the thinking, creative, and problem solving parts of work. But it’s still not reliable for thinking on its own, and it will need human operators to direct it and check its work.
In other words, AI will just enable humans to be more productive (and profitable for the company) in their work as overseers of AI.
It’s also worth mentioning that there’s a danger to this that no one is really talking about. Humans run the risk of losing their original ability to do things without the help of AI. Studies have already shown that [reliance on AI undermines critical thinking skills.](https://futurism.com/study-ai-critical-thinking?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwKnihBleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHi7eUW-3b8eB7yqPtEwcHVdJHnVxd4HxceLEu8sj8jzqoiZxVTYN8CcFOgC-_aem_nRqqyKvcEWD15U0E5zig9w) We run the very real risk of ending up without trained experts in various fields who can do the original tasks without AI. It’s something akin to what the film Wall-E warns us about.
If this isn’t a big “pull the ladder up after us” moment, i don’t know what is.
If this wipes all the entry level white collar jobs how does anyone start out anymore?
Everyone in the mid to senior level roles had a start at entry level. What happens when that pathway is gone?
When the last generation the learned through the period that requires them to have the skill retires and dies?
It’s all ready seen in my industry and that was due to greed and incompetence., not even ai.
CEO of AI company just pimping AI snake oiled with zero pushback from credulous journalists happy to repeat whatever dogshit hype the drops to pump his bank account.
Reddit also loves this shit.
Y’all (not everyone here, obviously, but too many) are being fucking played.
So many people depending on the LLMs to work are going to have a very harsh rug pull once enough data is collected to spin up specialty niche models that they themselves trained and fed data into.
Offices will be further condensed and the “lucky” ones will be there to manage many such “agent” models and dealing with outlier cases until the models learn those too.
Man with deep financial investment in AI says AI is great and going to replace humans next year for the 3rd year in a row.
Wow, shocking news, really.
Another thing holding back the use of AI to replace people is the reluctance of companies to commit to one particular platform. When it will become clear which platforms remain or rise to the top, it will be bloody.
Oh for fucks sake.
No.
As a professional engineer who uses GPT+ to write code and perform/check complicated engineering work and calculations with *astounding* accuracy and *first-attempt* precision…
You should be afraid. I could easily replace several of the people at my plant with an LLM trained on our IP/procedures, integrated with some middleware that will translate a JSON file into an API call for SAP and…
BAM! You’re done, just like that I have eliminated four people. FOUR! No more mistakes or costly issues from human error, no more 90K/yr salaries, no more insurance, a boatload of savings for the company. Woo hoo?
*sad party horn*
And the scary part is, YES, engineers could do this now with current tools. Build yourself an automated posting program, no AI needed… That would take a lot of effort though. There is so much shit you would have to setup, you’re talking a serious capital project for full enterprise integration, maybe 2 or 3 or more SWEs coupled with 1 or 2 MES devs/SAP functional team… and a month or two at least.
What I’m talking about with an LLM could be set up by a single SWE with decent python skills in like a week, and it would be able to resolve exceptions better than any custom code ever would in my opinion since it will be able to contextualize and reference procedures take action.
But hey! Keep pretending like you’re job is “too important” or “too hard” or “too complex” or “too whatever” you think it is for AI to replace you. Just remember this: *you are a meat computer*. If *your* little walnut can do it, there is absolutely no reason to be *so sure* that a much, much larger, much faster metal walnut won’t be able to get there eventually, and this is only the beginning. We went from “it’s a chatbot gimmick” to “it can write boilerplate code better and faster than entry level SWEs” in just a few years.
I think the next few years will be very interesting indeed.
Where do people think the money will come from for people to buy products and services made by ai, if everyone’s jobs are taken by ai?
Ai tech and the productivity that comes with it needs to be owned by the public.