OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has publicly walked back his earlier dire predictions that artificial intelligence would eliminate a swath of entry-level white-collar jobs, saying he is “delighted” the feared “jobs apocalypse” has not yet arrived. Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference on Tuesday, Altman told CBA CEO Matt Comyn that while OpenAI had been “roughly right” on its technological forecasts since launching ChatGPT in 2022, it was “pretty wrong” on the social and economic side. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he said.
Altman attributed his change of heart to a personal experiment in which he let an AI reply to his Slack and email messages with the label “this is Sam’s AI.” He found that people still crave authentic human connection. “We really do care about our interactions with people… this is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon,” he said. He also acknowledged that his earlier warnings may have caused unnecessary alarm: “People are like ‘oh you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering.’”
However, a growing body of research complicates Altman’s rosier new narrative. Data from the Yale Budget Lab and Brookings Institution shows stable macro-level unemployment, but Anthropic’s “observed exposure” metric reveals that the most vulnerable workers are older, female, more educated, and higher-paid. Meanwhile, hiring of younger workers in exposed fields has slowed since late 2022. S&P 500 companies shed over 400,000 jobs last year, and entry-level developer hiring in the U.S. has plunged 55% since 2019. In 2026 alone, U.S. firms have announced nearly 50,000 AI-linked job cuts, comprising about 17% of all layoffs. Meta simultaneously laid off 8,000 employees this week, tying the restructuring to AI investment. Goldman Sachs estimates AI reduced monthly U.S. payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs, while Morgan Stanley found British firms cut a net 8% of their workforce due to AI over the prior year.
Federal Reserve surveys indicate that one in four American workers now uses generative AI, with 81% saying it saves them time, yet the New York Fed found “little indication” of a distinct AI-driven drop in labor demand—though overall hiring has cooled. Altman’s retraction also comes as OpenAI reportedly prepares to confidentially file for a U.S. IPO targeting a $1 trillion valuation, raising questions about the timing of his softened stance. Ironically, OpenAI’s own 2026 policy document proposes taxes on automated labor, a national wealth fund seeded by AI companies, and pilots of a 32-hour work week—proposals that implicitly assume major labor disruption ahead.
