Anxieties about AI putting people out of jobs is bubbling over: A Reuters/Ipsos poll from August 2025 found 71% of Americans feared permanent job loss as a result of AI. Last week, Amazon announced 16,000 roles across the company would be slashed, adding to a total of more than 30,000 job cuts since October 2025. The move coincided with Amazon’s push toward AI development, though the tech giant attributed the reductions to an attempt to slash bureaucracy, not the technology.
A recent report from the Yale Budget Lab suggests there’s something to Amazon’s assertions that these mass cuts, even at tech companies, are not the result of AI displacing workers.
“While anxiety over the effects of AI on today’s labor market is widespread, our data suggests it remains largely speculative,” the report said. “The picture of AI’s impact on the labor market that emerges from our data is one that largely reflects stability, not major disruption at an economy-wide level.”
In order to measure AI’s impact on the labor force, the Yale Budget Lab tracked occupational mix, or changes in the types of jobs people in the U.S. have held, as well as length of unemployment for jobs with high exposure to AI.
While there have been changes in occupational mix since the 2022 release of ChatGPT, the rate of change has not increased enough to signal a massive shift, the report said. In addition, the length of unemployment for individuals with jobs that have high exposure to AI remained the same over time. Both metrics signaled no evidence of a massive labor disruption, from AI or another factor.
