The CEO of a $183 Billion AI Startup Says There’s a ‘Need to Warn the World’ About AI Taking Jobs

The leadership at Anthropic, a leading AI startup that raised billions of dollars earlier this month, is cautioning the world that AI is “likely” to take over jobs.

At the Axios AI + DC Summit on Wednesday, Anthropic Cofounders Dario Amodei and Jack Clark, who also serve as CEO and Head of Policy, respectively, said that AI’s potential to cause work displacement is picking up rapidly — and the situation is dire enough to warrant a warning.

“As with most things, when an exponential is moving very quickly, you can’t be sure,” Amodei said at the event. “I think it is likely enough to happen that we felt there was a need to warn the world about it and to speak honestly.”

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Amodei said that government intervention may be necessary to support individuals whose occupations are displaced by AI, and Clark emphasized that Anthropic predicts a substantial “scale of disruption” in society due to AI within the next five years.

“You need some kind of policy response,” Clark said.

^{Anthropic co-founder and CEO Dario Amodei. Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot}

Anthropic raised $13 billion earlier this month at a $183 billion valuation. The AI startup released a report earlier this week that suggested that AI has the “potential” to displace workers. The majority of businesses using its chatbot, Claude, were automating tasks instead of helping people accomplish them. Claude had 30 million monthly active users globally as of the second quarter of this year.

“Given clear automation patterns in business deployment, this may also bring disruption in labor markets,” the report stated.

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Amodei, meanwhile, has spoken about AI’s potential to replace human work before. In March, he stated that AI would take over writing code for companies within the next year. In May, he predicted that AI would wipe out half of all entry-level, white-collar jobs within the next five years, causing unemployment to rise to 20%.

And he’s not alone in issuing warnings. Geoffrey Hinton, known as the Godfather of AI due to his pioneering work in creating the technology, said in June that AI is going to “replace everybody” in white-collar jobs. A person and an AI assistant will take over the work of ten people, he predicted.

Hinton suggested paralegals and call center representatives will be some of the first roles replaced. He added that it would take AI some time to become skilled at physical labor, so “a good bet would be to be a plumber.”