Altman and Amodei Walk Back Their AI “Jobs Apocalypse” — “I’m Delighted to Be Wrong,” Says Altman, as Both Eye $1T IPOs

For the better part of two years, the two men building the most capable AI models on earth also delivered its grimmest labor forecasts. This week, both softened. Speaking with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on May 26, OpenAI’s Sam Altman called himself “pretty wrong” about AI’s near-term hit to employment: “I’m delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.” It is a striking reversal — and, as Fortune noted, one that arrives just as OpenAI and Anthropic both line up IPOs that could value each near $1 trillion.

Altman’s earlier warning was blunt. On the Uncapped podcast in June 2025 he said “a lot of jobs will go away,” echoing a wider industry message that entry-level knowledge work would be first in line for automation. What seems to have tempered him is partly empirical and partly personal: he tried handing his Slack messages and email over to AI, then quietly went back to answering them himself. “We really do care about our interactions with people,” he said. “This thing… is not something that I can imagine myself outsourcing to an AI anytime soon.”

Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has traveled a similar arc. The CEO who warned that AI could eliminate as much as 50% of white-collar jobs now frames automation less as a guillotine than as a force multiplier: “If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job… the 10% kind of expands to be 100%.” The disruption, in this telling, becomes redeployment — workers pushed up the value chain rather than out of it.

The timing invites a cynical read. Apocalyptic forecasts are useful when you are raising money on the promise of world-changing capability; they become a liability when you are courting public-market investors, regulators and enterprise customers who would rather not headline the next unemployment wave. With both OpenAI and Anthropic preparing blockbuster 2026 listings, the shift from “we will automate everything” to “we will make you more productive” is, at minimum, convenient.

The ground truth is genuinely murky. The Yale Budget Lab has found no significant change in the occupational mix or in unemployment duration for high-AI-exposure jobs since ChatGPT launched in late 2022 — evidence that mass displacement has not arrived on schedule. Yet 2026 tech layoffs have already passed 115,000, with Meta, Amazon and Snap among the companies naming AI as a factor. Whether Altman and Amodei are reading the data honestly or simply reading the room before an IPO, the men who promised the jobs apocalypse are now the ones arguing it may not come.