What the Biggest Names in Tech Think AI Means for White-Collar Jobs

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei kicked off the conversation by warning about how quickly large language models are advancing.

“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.”

Amodei said it can seem weird that the AI companies would warn about their own technology.

“Well, what if they’re right?” Amodei said.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some jobs will go away, but society will adapt.

“And the hard part about this is, I think it will happen faster than previous technological changes. But I think the new jobs will be better, and people will have better stuff,” Altman said during a live episode of The New York Times’ “Hard Fork” podcast in June.

Altman said that even if it were true that such a large number of jobs were about to be wiped out, “the inertia of society” wouldn’t allow for it.

“And the take that half the jobs are going to be gone in a year or two years or five years or whatever — I think that’s just — I think that’s not how society really works,” he said. “Even if the technology weren’t ready for that, the inertia of society, which will be helpful in this case, is like — there’s a lot of mass there.”

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang didn’t mince words.

“I pretty much disagree with almost everything he says,” Huang told reporters of Amoedi’s views at VivaTech 2025 in Paris. “He thinks AI is so scary, but only they should do it.”

Huang said that he’s much more optimistic.

“If you want things to be done safely and responsibly, you should do it in the open,” Huang said, likening AI development to medical research, where transparency and peer review are essential. “I believe AI is not that expensive. Do I think AI will change jobs? It will change everyone’s — it’s changed mine.”

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he’s seeing no evidence of such a near-immediate upheaval.

“That isn’t how I see AI,” Benioff said during a recent onstage interview at the 2025 AI for Good Global Summit. “Maybe they have AI, I don’t have. But in the AI I have, it’s not going to be some huge mass layoff of white-collar workers, it is a radical augmentation of the workforce.”

Benioff encouraged people to “shed their fear” about AI.

“When I’m talking to our customers, I’m not hearing them say, “Oh, now I’m laying off these people because this A,B,C technology increase because of AI.’ So, I think we need to somehow shed the fear of what that all means.”

Ford CEO Jim Farley said he sees problems ahead.

“Artificial intelligence is going to replace literally half of all white-collar workers in the US,” Farley said during an appearance at the Aspen Ideas Festival.

Farley said he’s concerned that too much of the American education system is focused on four-year degrees instead of trades.

Mark Cuban said the situation will be the opposite of Amodei’s warning.

“Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than 2m secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation. They were the original white collar displacements,” Cuban wrote on in a post on Bluesky.

“New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment,” he continued.

Like Altman, OpenAI’s COO Brad Lightcap doesn’t see the sky falling.

“We have no evidence of this,” Lightcap said during the “Hard Fork” podcast taping. “And Dario is a scientist. And I would hope he takes an evidence-based approach to these types of things.”

Lightcap said that every technology changes the job market.

“I think every time you get a platform shift, you get a change in the job market,” he said.” I mean, in 1900, 40 percent of people worked in agriculture. It’s 2 percent today. Microsoft Excel has probably been the greatest job displacer of the 20th century.”

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said that AI is already changing workflows. He said it will soon lead to a reduction in some jobs.

“As we roll out more Generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” Jassy said in a memo posted to the Amazon website. “We will need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today, and more people doing other types of jobs.”

Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said AI may cause a recession due to the sheer number of job cuts.

“I don’t want to be one of them,” Siemiatkowski said of CEOs who downplay the changes AI will bring. “I want to be honest, I want to be fair, and I want to tell what I see so that society can start taking preparations.”