CEO Anthropic: ‘AI could cause painful disruption in the job market’

Mr. Amodei expressed his worries in a nearly 20,000-word blog post this week, arguing that the risks AI poses have not been taken seriously and warning the technology will lead to a “shock” bigger than any before in the job market.

According to him, new technologies often create shocks in the labor market and people have always recovered in the past, but that is because they only affect a small part of the range of human capabilities. “AI has significantly broader and faster impacts, so I fear it will be much more difficult to address,” he wrote.

Amodei lists the potential harmful effects of AI such as becoming autonomous and unpredictable, being used by bad forces or terrorist groups to create biological weapons, and being exploited by some countries to seize power.

He also commented that the development speed of AI is much faster than previous technological innovations and it is very difficult for people to adapt to this speed, both in adjusting the way of operating old jobs and switching to new careers. The labor market remains resilient in the long term, but the short-term transition period will be “unusually painful”.

CEO Anthropic believes that the reason is that AI has a “wide cognitive scope”, not only affecting a single industry but can simultaneously eliminate jobs in finance, consulting, law and technology, making it impossible for workers to switch to other industries with similar skills.

“AI does not replace a specific job but acts as a universal labor replacement for humans,” he commented, saying that government intervention is needed to solve the problem, for example progressive taxation targeting AI companies.

According to data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, artificial intelligence is the cause of nearly 55,000 workers being laid off in the US in 2025. Research by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) last November showed that AI could take over the jobs of 11.7% of US workers.

Meanwhile, some technology leaders see AI as having the potential to create more jobs for manual workers. At the World Economic Forum (WEF) taking place in Davos (Switzerland) this month, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that AI will create many jobs for plumbers, electricians, and construction workers because the need to build data centers is currently very large.

“AI Godfather” Geoffrey Hinton also said that manual labor would be safer against AI. However, the reason he gave was that artificial intelligence takes longer to achieve the necessary dexterity.