A year ago, tech CEOs said AI was about to wipe out huge chunks of white-collar jobs. So, where's the carnage?

The Guardian went and checked the actual numbers, and the story is stranger than the prediction.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in May 2025 that "half" of all entry-level white-collar jobs would vanish. A month later, OpenAI's Sam Altman went further, foreseeing the end of "certain job categories."

Since ChatGPT launched in 2022, unemployment for the 20% of workers most exposed to AI rose by just 0.77 percentage points -- actually less than the 0.85-point rise for the least-exposed workers, per Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research.

MIT economist Paul Osterman, author of Disposable Workers, says about 35% of the US workforce is already considered "easily replaceable." AI isn't causing mass layoffs -- it's pushing more employers toward contractors and freelancers instead of hiring, which means more workers are left without a career ladder at all.

So it's not the apocalypse that was promised. It's something slower and, in some ways, harder to fight: not fewer jobs, just fewer paths up.

Source: https://www.aol.com/articles/ai-supposed-destroy-jobs-where-100027000.html (Guardian reporting, Varsha Bansal)