Dario Amodei warns AI may cause ‘unusually painful’ disruption to jobs

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has issued a fresh warning about how AI will disrupt the job market, saying it will cause “unusually painful” disruption.

The AI chief, who co-founded Anthropic in 2021 with his sister Daniela Amodei and is behind the creation of the AI chatbot Claude, warned AI would destroy half of all white-collar jobs last year. The issue has divided opinion among business and tech leaders. Amodei’s warning prompted Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang to say he “thinks AI is so scary, but only [Anthropic] should do it.”

On Monday, Amodei published a roughly 20,000-word essay arguing the risks AI poses are not being taken seriously and warning the technology will lead to a “shock” to the job market, bigger than any before.

Amodei set out what he regards as the potential harms of AI, including the tech becoming autonomous and unpredictable, bad actors or terrorist groups using it to create bio-weapons, and some countries creating a “global totalitarian dictatorship” by exploiting AI to gain disproportionate power.

“Humanity is about to be handed almost unimaginable power, and it is deeply unclear whether our social, political, and technological systems possess the maturity to wield it,” Amodei wrote.

In the essay, he elaborated on his argument that humans will find it difficult to recover from AI’s impact on the labor market in the short-term.

“New technologies often bring labor market shocks, and in the past, humans have always recovered from them, but I am concerned that this is because these previous shocks affected only a small fraction of the full possible range of human abilities, leaving room for humans to expand to new tasks,” Amodei said.

“AI will have effects that are much broader and occur much faster, and therefore I worry it will be much more challenging to make things work out well,” he added.

Amodei predicted that humans would be unable to adapt to AI development’s rapid pace, and this would trigger an “unusually painful” short-term shock in the labor market.

“The pace of progress in AI is much faster than for previous technological revolutions,” he wrote. “It is hard for people to adapt to this pace of change, both to the changes in how a given job works and in the need to switch to new jobs.”

He said this was largely because AI’s “cognitive breadth” meant it wouldn’t affect one industry but could simultaneously wipe out jobs across finance, consulting, law, and tech, denying workers the option to “switch lanes” to another industry where their skillset was a match.

“The technology is not replacing a single job but acting as a ‘general labor substitute for humans,'” Amodei wrote.

Tackling this problem, according to Amodei, will “require government intervention,” such as “progressive taxation,” which targets AI firms in particular.

AI eliminating jobs has dominated headlines in the past year. The technology was given as a reason for nearly 55,000 layoffs in the U.S. in 2025, per December data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.

A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in November found AI can already do the job of 11.7% of the U.S. labor market, saving up to $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, healthcare, and other professional services.

Consultancy firm Mercer’s Global Talent Trends 2026 report, which surveyed 12,000 people worldwide, found 40% of employees feared losing their jobs to AI, up from 28% in 2024.

But Deutsche Bank analysts said in a note last week that “AI redundancy washing will be a significant feature of 2026,” as major companies blame the technology for job cuts that actually have other causes.

Yale University’s Budget Lab said in an October report that AI hadn’t yet caused widespread job losses, according to its analysis of U.S. labor market data from 2022 to 2025. It found that the share of workers in different jobs hadn’t changed significantly since ChatGPT’s debut in November sparked a surge of interest in AI.

Others see job creation in blue-collar industries, for example, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang said AI is actually going to “create a lot of jobs” for plumbers, electricians, construction workers, and those building AI-related factories.

“And so we’re talking about six-figure salaries for people who are building chip factories or computer factories or AI factories,” he added.

JPMorgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon shared a similar view at the World Economic Forum last week, saying that governments need to come in at a “local level” and provide incentives to firms to retrain people and provide income assistance as AI takes over some jobs.