AI could wipe out half of office jobs, push US unemployment to 20%, warns Claude chatbot creator

Speaking to U.S. news outlet Axios on May 28, Amodei said executives and policymakers must stop "sugar-coating" the scale of potential mass layoffs in sectors like technology, finance, and law, and instead be transparent with workers about the threat. "Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," he said. "It sounds crazy, and people just do not believe it."

A January survey by the World Economic Forum found that 41% of employers expect to reduce their workforce due to AI automation by 2030. "Advances in AI and renewable energy are reshaping the (labor) market – driving an increase in demand for many technology or specialist roles while driving a decline for others, such as graphic designers," the WEF said in a statement at the time.

Amodei, whose company is behind the Claude chatbot, predicted that the job market fallout would unfold over the next one to five years. At the same time, he said AI would likely deliver massive gains for the economy and accelerate breakthroughs in healthcare. "Cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced — and 20% of people do not have jobs," he said. As of now, the U.S. unemployment rate stands at 4.2%, according to the New York Post.

A person works with computer in an office. Illustration from Pexels

His warning comes as Anthropic races against tech giants like Google, Meta, and OpenAI to develop artificial general intelligence, or AGI, AI with human-level or even superior cognitive abilities. Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 after leaving OpenAI, joins a growing list of tech leaders expressing concerns over AI’s labor market impact.

Earlier this year, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg discussed the expanding role of AI within his company. "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," he said during an appearance on "The Joe Rogan Experience" podcast.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned that AI would significantly affect "knowledge workers," including writers, accountants, architects, and software engineers.

However, a study published this month by economists Anders Humlum and Emilie Vestergaard at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research found that while AI chatbots assist in task completion, they have yet to produce a "significant impact" on the workforce, as reported by Fortune magazine."AI chatbots have had no significant impact on earnings or recorded hours in any occupation," the researchers stated.

The study surveyed 25,000 workers across 7,000 workplaces in Denmark—where AI adoption and labor practices are similar to the U.S.—and focused on roles vulnerable to AI disruption. The researchers found no mass job displacement, nor did they observe notable changes in productivity or wage increases for AI-equipped workers.