GoKawiilTwo of the most influential CEOs in tech spent the last year warning that AI would gut white-collar employment. Now they’re admitting they were wrong, joining other leaders like Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon in casting doubt on an AI job apocalypse.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s economic impact—a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. Solomon, meanwhile, has argued consistently since at least late 2025 that the panic was overblown—and is now pointing to a century of American economic history to say he was right.
“I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” Altman told Comyn. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”
Altman added that he’s taken a lot of flack for his hype, but better safe than sorry.”People are like, ‘Oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom’ but at the time I was like, ‘I see this is a real risk we should probably talk about it.’ and it still may.”
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly preparing to launch their respective IPOs this year, each company with an estimated valuation of $1 trillion.
Two reversals and a vindication
For the OpenAI CEO, his comments walk back his prophecy on AI’s impact on labor. A year ago, Altman told his brother Jack on the Uncapped podcast: “A lot of jobs will go away…we have always been really good at figuring out new things to do…I’m not a believer that that ever runs out.”
Now he says the displacement he feared simply hasn’t materialized, and a personal experiment reinforced it. He tried delegating his Slack and email responses to AI, then began responding to come again manually.
“We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said. “This thing…is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon. It really updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought.”
Amodei’s evolution has been similarly dramatic. While he previously claimed AI could wipe out 50% of white-collar jobs, he reframed automation earlier this month not as a destroyer of jobs but a multiplier of output: “If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,” he said, offering a prediction similar to those made by economists Alex Imas and Tyler Cowen. “And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.”
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