Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei hasn’t backed off his prediction that AI will fuel a white-collar jobs apocalypse. He’s also calling for ambitious federal job training programs for displaced workers, with funding coming from Anthropic and other AI companies.
“The government is going to need to step in, especially during the transition,” Amodei said Wednesday at an Axios event in Washington.
Amodei and Anthropic’s co-founder, Jack Clark, have been making the rounds in D.C. this week to press that case. They found agreement among some congressional Democrats. But Republicans appear to be a tougher sell.
“You need some kind of policy response at the scale of disruption we expect in the next five years,” said Clark, who oversees the company’s growing policy shop.
Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat, this week unveiled a broad plan for government action on AI. His proposal includes the creation of a federal fund—backed by contributions from leading AI companies—that would pay for investments in workers, infrastructure, and responsible deployment of the tech.
“There is a possibility that we could have millions of people put out of work because of artificial intelligence,” Kelly said.
When asked at the Axios event which part of his public-private plan is the most important—and most likely to attract bipartisan backers—Kelly pointed to upskilling and reskilling, including apprenticeships. “That model could work really well here,” he said.
Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also called for an AI jobs vision during the Axios event, and for tax incentives to expand apprenticeships.
However, Kelly’s “AI horizon fund” won’t go anywhere without Republican support. Neither Sriram Kishnam, the White House senior policy advisor on AI, nor Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, dwelled on workforce issues during their time on stage at the Axios summit. And one key White House nominee dismissed what he described as “top-down” solutions to AI’s potential impacts on jobs.
AI increases worker productivity, said Jacob Helberg, the Trump administration’s nominee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment. If labor gets more efficient, he said, demand for labor goes up. As with the transition to the personal computer, that means more jobs.
“The notion that the government necessarily has to hold the hands of every single person getting displaced actually underestimates the resourcefulness of people,” Helberg said.