A hot potato: OpenAI boss Sam Altman says he is delighted that the AI-caused jobs apocalypse he predicted has not come to pass – news that's unlikely to reassure anyone who's lost their job because of AI. It appears that the CEO's taking the view that although things are pretty bad, they're really not as bad as he expected.
Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney, Australia, Altman admitted that his early prediction that entire job classes would be wiped out by AI has not come true – at least not yet.
"My scorecard, at the highest level, would be we've been roughly right on technological predictions and pretty wrong on the social and economic implications," said the CEO.
Much like Anthropic boss Dario Amodei, Altman's biggest warning had been aimed at entry-level white-collar jobs, but he said the short-term impact had not been anywhere near as bad as he expected. "I'm delighted to be wrong about that," Altman said.
"I now think I understand more about why it hasn't, and I'm obviously grateful, but that is an area where my intuitions were just off."
"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."
It seems even the ChatGPT maker admits there are some elements of jobs that require a human touch. Altman himself said he had been using AI to respond to Slack and email messages but eventually reverted to answering some himself.
"We really do care about our interactions with people and this thing, which is a huge amount of my time, is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon."
"It really, in both positive and negative ways, updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought," he said.
"I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about."
Amodei, who has regularly warned of an AI jobs apocalypse, has also started changing his tone. In 2025, the Anthropic CEO said that AI could wipe out about half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the next five years, leading to unemployment spikes up to 20%. Today, he's talking about how productivity levels will increase enormously as a result of the technology.
The two AI bosses' words come just as tech layoffs in 2026 pass 115,000, quickly approaching the 124,000 that we saw for the entirety of 2025. A huge number of these cuts are reportedly tied to AI, either through direct job replacement or resources being redirected toward AI infrastructure.
The AI-driven jobs wipeout Altman and Amodei predicted might not have reached apocalyptic levels just yet, but the future isn't looking too rosy. A recent survey of almost 1,000 executives found that 99% expect AI to trigger layoffs at their companies within the next two years.