Anthropic’s head of economics, Peter McCrory, published a lengthy X essay this week arguing AI has caused no material rise in US unemployment—a data-driven rebuttal that lands in sharp tension with CEO Dario Amodei’s repeated warnings of an imminent white-collar bloodbath.
The prediction that started it
Amodei has staked out some of the industry’s most alarming public positions on AI’s labor impact, though his framing has shifted considerably over the past year.
In May 2025, he told Axios AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10%-20% within one to five years, urging companies and policymakers to stop “sugarcoating” the risk. He doubled down in a January 2026 essay, “The Adolescence of Technology,” warning AI functions as a “general labor substitute for humans” that will displace work from the lower tiers of skill levels to the upper, potentially creating a lasting underclass of unemployed or very-low-wage workers.
By this May, he had moderated somewhat, reframing automation as a multiplier of output and invoking the Jevons paradox recently repopularized by Apollo Global Management’s Torsten Slok: “If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,” he said, explaining “the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity.” The following month he reescalated, arguing in June significant, enduring job loss might be “an intrinsic property of the technology” itself, and calling for government responses including wage insurance and universal basic income.
