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The CEO of Anthropic is sounding the alarm on the future of entry-level white-collar employment: As many as 50% of these roles could disappear within the next one to five years.
CEO Dario Amodei has urged the US government and AI industry leaders to stop downplaying the likelihood of widespread job losses across sectors like tech, finance, law, and consulting — especially among junior professionals.
Amodei said his goal in speaking publicly is to spur both regulators and major AI developers, including OpenAI and Google, to begin preparing for a possible surge in unemployment that could reach 20%.
“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told Axios. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”
Most AI systems are marketed as productivity tools that assist workers. Still, Amodei warned that automation is rapidly evolving beyond support roles and could soon replace many of the jobs it was meant to enhance.
“It’s going to happen in a small amount of time — as little as a couple of years or less,’’ he said.
Predictions that AI will not free up humans for high-level tasks
President Donald Trump has not commented on the risks of AI taking away jobs. And while some experts warn of severe disruptions, others argue that AI’s impact on employment could be more nuanced. Analysts at organizations like the Brookings Institution and MIT have suggested that while certain routine tasks may be automated, new roles could emerge.
However, Steve Bannon, a former top official during Trump’s first term, believes AI will wreak significant damage on jobs.
“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 Axios.
Steve Andriole, a faculty member at the Villanova School of Business, also echoed that sentiment. In a February article on Medium, Andriole disputed the long-held argument that AI will free up humans to focus on higher-level tasks, saying he hasn’t seen any evidence to support that.
He cited a long list of jobs — not just entry-level ones — that he believes are at risk.
“It’s time to stop reassuring ourselves about what AI will not replace,’’ Andriole wrote. “If the technology trends are any indication of impact, machine learning and generative AI are far more likely to replace than preserve knowledge workers. It will take some time for this prediction to be validated, but arguments that AI has limits and that humans are uniquely qualified to make certain decisions are flat-out wrong.”
Read eWeek’s analysis about which jobs are most AI-proof, as well as our coverage about how Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus 4 model exhibited troubling behavior during internal evaluations, including simulated scenarios of coercion or manipulation.