Sam Altman Recants His “Jobs Apocalypse” AI Forecast; Explains Why Views Shifted

(SeaPRwire) –   As Sam Altman rose to become one of the most influential chief executives in the artificial intelligence industry, the OpenAI leader has repeatedly made bold claims about what impact this new technology would have on global employment.

He previously stated that AI would “probably replace most of the jobs people do today,” that entire categories of work would be “totally, totally gone,” and that workers impacted by these dramatic shifts would “find all sorts of new things to do.”

Now, however, Altman appears to have reversed his earlier stance, saying he is “delighted to be wrong” about the effect AI would have on jobs.

“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” he shared during a virtual interview at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA) conference in Sydney on Tuesday.

“I thought there would have been more progress eliminating entry-level white-collar jobs by this point than what has actually happened,” Altman said.

“I now think I understand much more about why this hasn’t played out, and I’m obviously grateful for that, but that was one area where my early instincts were simply wrong.”

Altman went on to explain that the “human element” of work can not be replaced by AI, and that people value interacting with one another in professional settings.

“We really do care about our interactions with people,” he added, which he said—for better or worse— “updated me to thinking that the overall jobs outlook is likely to be very different than we originally expected.”

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from TIME.

What changed Sam Altman’s mind? 

Altman’s noticeable change of opinion comes at a critical turning point for the global AI industry. Three of the world’s largest AI companies are moving toward public offerings: SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic all plan to seek new capital from investors soon to hit their extremely ambitious growth targets.

OpenAI aims to hit $280 billion in revenue by 2030, up from its current $25 billion annual revenue.  SpaceX is targeting a $1.5 trillion valuation for its upcoming initial public offering (IPO). And Anthropic is reportedly in talks to secure $30 billion in funding that would value the company at $900 billion, according to the Financial Times. 

Despite these massive projections, there are growing signs that many companies are still struggling to unlock real tangible value from AI adoption.

Uber’s President and Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Macdonald, also said in a recent podcast interview published May 22 that it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the company’s AI spending. The firm’s Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, went viral in April after admitting Uber burned through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget in just four months. 

Last month, Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, noted that AI use does not actually save companies money on labor costs, and can end up costing more than the human workers currently employed by the business.

“For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the combined costs of our employees,” he told Axios.

Microsoft has also raised concerns about the high costs of AI. The company has reportedly begun canceling licenses for its engineers to use Anthropic’s Claude due to steep costs, a move that has raised new questions about the real cost of widespread AI adoption. 

Economists disagree widely on whether AI will actually lead to a full “job apocalypse,” largely because adoption is progressing much slower than technological advancement itself. A recent Brookings report found that “rapid advances in AI capability are not translating automatically into broad economic gains or meaningful adoption.”

“In the medium term, AI adoption is also likely to be costly and uneven,” the report found.

The Yale Budget Lab, which has also tracked AI’s impact on the labor market, found in a May study that AI was likely not the cause of any weakening in the labor market, and that there has not yet been a meaningful change in unemployment through March 2026 for workers in jobs with high AI exposure.

But after his early doom-focused predictions, Altman is now an outlier among industry leaders when it comes to downplaying AI’s impact on work. 

Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, said last year that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will disappear within the next five years, and unemployment could skyrocket to 10-20%.

“We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming,” Amodei told Axios in 2025. “I don’t think this is on people’s radar.”

At the TIME100 Summit last month, many business leaders and CEOs argued that AI will revolutionize entry-level jobs. Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel said that the “lowest rung on the ladder has been pulled away by AI” when discussing how customer service work at his company is now handled by AI.

It is true that thousands of jobs are currently being cut amid the push for AI adoption, with most cuts occurring at technology companies. 

Meta eliminated roughly 8,000 roles in May— about 10% of its total workforce — and scrapped thousands more open positions it had already posted, citing a shift to AI as the reason for the cuts. Financial software company Intuit cut 17% of its staff, or 3,000 people, this month. Amazon and Alphabet have announced multiple rounds of layoffs as they push for greater AI adoption and operational efficiency. 

Artificial intelligence has been cited as justification for nearly 50,000 job cuts through April this year, according to research by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas.  

“Technology companies continue to announce large-scale cuts and are leading all industries in layoff announcements. They are also often citing AI spend and innovation. Regardless of whether individual jobs are being replaced by AI, the funding for those roles has been redirected,” said Andy Challenger, workplace expert and chief revenue officer for Challenger, Gray & Christmas.