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Biden blocked it. Now Trump is traveling to Pittsburgh to celebrate Japan's takeover of US Steel S&P 500 posts best month since 2023 as Wall Street tries to ignore the trade war Hot Stocks ----- is driving the US market Something isn't loading properly. Please check back later. Ad Feedback The 'white-collar bloodbath' is all part of the AI hype machine Allison Morrow Analysis by Allison Morrow, CNN 4 minute read Updated 8:47 AM EDT, Fri May 30, 2025 Link Copied! Follow: AI See your latest updates Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is positioning himself as an AI truth-teller. He is also a salesman. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei is positioning himself as an AI truth-teller. He is also a salesman. Fabrice Coffrini/AFP/Getty Images/File A version of this story appeared in CNN Business' Nightcap newsletter. To get it in your inbox, sign up for free here. New York CNN -- If the CEO of a soda company declared that soda-making technology is getting so good it's going to ruin the global economy, you'd be forgiven for thinking that person is either lying or fully detached from reality. Yet when tech CEOs do the same thing, people tend to perk up. ICYMI: The 42-year-old billionaire Dario Amodei, who runs the AI firm Anthropic, told Axios this week that the technology he and other companies are building could wipe out half of all entry-level office jobs ... sometime soon. Maybe in the next couple of years, he said. He reiterated that claim in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper on Thursday. "AI is starting to get better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we're going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it," Amodei told Cooper. "AI is going to get better at what everyone does, including what I do, including what other CEOs do." To be clear, Amodei didn't cite any research or evidence for that 50% estimate. And that was just one of many of the wild claims he made that are increasingly part of a Silicon Valley script: AI will fix everything, but first it has to ruin everything. Why? Just trust us. In this as-yet fictional world, "cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10% a year, the budget is balanced -- and 20% of people don't have jobs," Amodei told Axios, repeating one of the industry's favorite unfalsifiable claims about a disease-free utopia on the horizon, courtesy of AI. But how will the US economy, in particular, grow so robustly when the jobless masses can't afford to buy anything? Amodei didn't say. (As an aside: I asked labor economist Aaron Sojourner about this scenario of high unemployment plus strong economic growth, and he said there is a theory of the case, if you squint really hard. Amodei may believe that AI can increase productivity and make each hour of labor create more goods and services. But if that's the case, he's imagining "a 30% jump in labor productivity to get that combination of unemployment and GDP growth," said Sojourner, a senior researcher at the W. E. Upjohn Institute for Employment Research. "That is a wildly unprecedented vision," he added, noting that in the 1980s and 90s, computer adoption gave the world all kinds of tools that reshaped the labor market. But labor productivity grew just 2% to 3%.) Anyway. The point is, Amodei is a salesman, and it's in his interest to make his product appear inevitable and so powerful it's scary. Axios framed Amodei's economic prediction as a "white-collar bloodbath." Even some AI optimists were put off by Amodei's stark characterization. "Someone needs to remind the CEO that at one point there were more than (2 million) secretaries. There were also separate employees to do in office dictation," wrote tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban on Bluesky. "They were the original white collar displacements. New companies with new jobs will come from AI and increase TOTAL employment." Little of what Amodei told Axios was new, but it was calibrated to sound just outrageous enough to draw attention to Anthropic's work, days after it released a major model update to its Claude chatbot, one of the top rivals to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Amodei stands to profit off the very technology he claims will gut the labor market. But here he is, telling everyone the truth and sounding the alarm! He's trying to warn us, he's one of the good ones! Yeaaahhh. So, this is kind of Anthropic's whole ~thing.~ It refers to itself primarily as an "AI safety and research" company. They are the AI guys who see the potential harms of AI clearly -- not through the rose-colored glasses worn by the techno-utopian simps over at OpenAI. (In fact, Anthropic's founders, including Amodei, left OpenAI over ideological differences.) My two cents... Look, I want to live a cancer-free utopia where I only have to work a few hours a week and there's no poverty and stuff just works. But do I believe that generative AI is the key to unlocking that fantasyland? I do not. And no tech pioneers have proven their case. Generative AI from large language models like ChatGPT and Claude are really good at some very specific stuff: They can summarize documents, write dumb emails, help kids cheat on their homework, and even recommend summer reading lists so obscure not even the authors knew they'd written them. Heck, they could probably generate this newsletter and mimic my voice. But they hit their limits fast. They hallucinate. They get basic facts wrong. They are susceptible to manipulation. (And those are all things we human beings can do just fine on our own.) If AI companies can take these handy, quasi-reliable text predictors and turn them into an economic revolution, fine. But that seems so far off in the future that Amodei's warnings feel more like an ad than a PSA. It's on them to show their work: Show us how AI could be so destructive and how Anthropic can fix it -- rather than just shouting about the risks. Related Ad Feedback Ad Feedback Ad Feedback CNN Business Videos still_21664186_11457.624_still.jpg CNN Video E.l.f. Beauty will raise prices by $1. Hear the company's CEO explain why 2:05 May 30, 2025 Screenshot 2025-05-30 at 2.46.53 PM.png CNN Video Top three clicks: Headlines from the Middle East this week 2:07 May 30, 2025
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Clipped From Video Video Small biz owner: Don't need Trump to 'micromanage' company 5:17 May 29, 2025 Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tells CNN's Anderson Cooper that AI could wipe out all white collar entry level jobs CNN Video AI entrepreneur warns of potential future job losses 10:47 May 29, 2025 Ad Feedback Ad Feedback [ ] Subscribe --------------------------------------------------------------------- Sign in My Account * Settings * Newsletters * Topics you follow * Sign out Your CNN account Sign in to your CNN account --------------------------------------------------------------------- Live TV Listen Watch --------------------------------------------------------------------- * US + Crime + Justice * World + Africa + Americas + Asia + Australia + China + Europe + India + Middle East + United Kingdom * Politics + Trump + Facts First + CNN Polls + 2025 Elections * Business + Tech + Media + Calculators + Videos * Markets + Pre-markets + After-Hours + Fear & Greed + Investing + Markets Now + Nightcap * Health + Life, But Better + Fitness + Food + Sleep + Mindfulness + Relationships * Entertainment + Movies + Television + Celebrity * Tech + Innovate + Foreseeable Future + Mission: Ahead + Work Transformed + Innovative Cities * Style + Arts + Design + Fashion + Architecture + Luxury + Beauty + Video * Travel + Destinations + Food & Drink + Stay + News + Videos * Sports + Pro Football + College Football + Basketball + Baseball + Soccer + Olympics + Hockey * Science + Space + Life + Unearthed * Climate + Solutions + Weather * Weather + Video + Climate * Ukraine-Russia War * Israel-Hamas War * Watch + Live TV + CNN Headlines + CNN Shorts + Shows A-Z + CNN10 + CNN Max + CNN TV Schedules + FlashDocs * Listen + CNN 5 Things + Chasing Life with Dr. Sanjay Gupta + The Assignment with Audie Cornish + One Thing + Tug of War + CNN Political Briefing + The Axe Files + All There Is with Anderson Cooper + All CNN Audio podcasts * CNN Underscored + Electronics + Fashion + Beauty + Health & Fitness + Home + Reviews + Deals + Gifts + Travel + Outdoors + Pets * Games + Daily Crossword + Jumble Crossword + Sudoblock + Sudoku + 5 Things Quiz * About CNN + Subscribe + Photos + Investigations + CNN Profiles + CNN Leadership + CNN Newsletters + Work for CNN --------------------------------------------------------------------- Business Watch Listen Live TV --------------------------------------------------------------------- Follow CNN Business * * * * Subscribe Sign in My Account * Settings * Newsletters * Topics you follow * Sign out Your CNN account Sign in to your CNN account --------------------------------------------------------------------- Most stock quote data provided by BATS. US market indices are shown in real time, except for the S&P 500 which is refreshed every two minutes. All times are ET. Factset: FactSet Research Systems Inc. All rights reserved. Chicago Mercantile: Certain market data is the property of Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and its licensors. All rights reserved. Dow Jones: The Dow Jones branded indices are proprietary to and are calculated, distributed and marketed by DJI Opco, a subsidiary of S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and have been licensed for use to S&P Opco, LLC and CNN. Standard & Poor's and S&P are registered trademarks of Standard & Poor's Financial Services LLC and Dow Jones is a registered trademark of Dow Jones Trademark Holdings LLC. All content of the Dow Jones branded indices Copyright S&P Dow Jones Indices LLC and/or its affiliates. Fair value provided by IndexArb.com. Market holidays and trading hours provided by Copp Clark Limited. Terms of Use Privacy Policy Ad Choices Accessibility & CC About Subscribe Newsletters Transcripts Help Center (c) 2025 Cable News Network. A Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All Rights Reserved. CNN Sans (tm) & (c) 2016 Cable News Network.