Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath

At Axios, we ask our managers to explain why AI won’t be doing a specific job before green-lighting its approval. (Axios stories are always written and edited by humans.) Few want to admit this publicly, but every CEO is or will soon be doing this privately. Jim wrote a column last week explaining a few steps CEOs can take now.

Amodei, 42, who’s building the very technology he predicts could reorder society overnight, said he’s speaking out in hopes of jarring government and fellow AI companies into preparing — and protecting — the nation.

Here’s how Amodei and others fear the white-collar bloodbath is unfolding:

1. OpenAI, Google, Anthropic and other large AI companies keep vastly improving the capabilities of their large language models (LLMs) to meet and beat human performance with more and more tasks. This is happening and accelerating.
2. The U.S. government, worried about losing ground to China or spooking workers with preemptive warnings, says little. The administration and Congress neither regulate AI nor caution the American public. This is happening and showing no signs of changing.
3. Most Americans, unaware of the growing power of AI and its threat to their jobs, pay little attention. This is happening, too.

And then, almost overnight, business leaders see the savings of replacing humans with AI — and do this en masse. They stop opening up new jobs, stop backfilling existing ones, and then replace human workers with agents or related automated alternatives.