Altman and Amodei Said AI Would Kill Your Job. Now They Say They Were Wrong.

In June 2025, Sam Altman warned that entire job categories were at serious risk of elimination by AI. Dario Amodei went further — claiming that up to 50% of white-collar jobs could dissolve within five years. Both men were treated as oracles. Their warnings generated congressional hearings, think-tank reports, media panics and regulatory proposals across Europe and the United States.

This week, both men said they were wrong.

The timing — as both companies prepare for the largest IPOs in AI history — is not a coincidence. And the reversal deserves more scrutiny than it has received.

What They Said Then — And What They Say Now

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in an interview with Commonwealth Bank of Australia CEO Matt Comyn on Tuesday, said he was "pretty wrong" about AI's economic impact — a reversal from his June 2025 warnings that entry-level roles were at serious risk. "I'm delighted to be wrong about this," Altman told Comyn. "I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who once claimed AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs, now says automation may actually expand the work people do. He reframed automation not as a destroyer of jobs but as a productivity multiplier — suggesting that automating 90% of a job simply causes the remaining 10% to expand and become the new focus.

The fear of AI and automation displacing human workers has been a defining anxiety for the past couple of years. This panic was actively fuelled by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who repeatedly warned that Gen AI would dismantle white-collar employment. Cue May 2026 and the narrative has abruptly shifted.

The IPO Timing — The Elephant in the Room

The admissions come as both companies reportedly prepare for IPOs this year, with each estimated to carry a valuation of approximately $1 trillion. OpenAI completed a Series C funding round on March 31, 2026, at a post-money valuation of approximately $852 billion. Multiple reports indicate the company is preparing to file for a public listing as early as September 2026, which would make it one of the largest IPOs in history.

Many now believe this sudden narrative shift stems from impending public listings marked in the calendar for both the companies this year.

The logic is straightforward. A company preparing to sell shares to the public cannot simultaneously be telling the world that its product will destroy the livelihoods of the people buying those shares. Job apocalypse rhetoric is incompatible with IPO prospectus language. The reversal is not a scientific update. It is investor relations management — executed at the highest level of the AI industry.

What the Data Actually Shows

The reversal would be less troubling if the data clearly supported it. It does not — at least not clearly.
Tech layoffs through May 2026 have exceeded 115,000 — approaching the 124,000 total for all of 2025 — with companies including Meta, Amazon, and Snap explicitly citing AI as a rationale. Yet the Yale Budget Lab has found no significant changes in occupational mix or unemployment duration in high-AI-exposure jobs since ChatGPT launched in late 2022.

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said this week that despite high usage of AI within the company, he could not draw a clear line between that usage and measurable improvements in consumer-facing products. "That link is not there yet," Macdonald said. Uber is not alone — Microsoft and Duolingo have also begun publicly questioning whether high AI adoption rates automatically translate to business outcomes.

The honest interpretation of the data is not that AI is harmless to employment — nor that it is apocalyptic. It is that the effects are uneven, slower than predicted and concentrated in ways that aggregate statistics obscure. The Yale Budget Lab finds no aggregate unemployment signal. But 115,000 tech layoffs with AI cited as a driver are real people in real circumstances that no aggregate statistic captures.

The Uber Budget Problem — AI's Commercial Reality Check

The most honest corporate voice on AI's commercial reality this week was not Altman or Amodei. It was Uber.
Uber's Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, went viral in April for admitting Uber burned through its 2026 Claude Code budget in four months.

Uber COO Andrew Macdonald said this week that despite high usage of AI within the company, he could not draw a clear line between that usage and measurable improvements in consumer-facing products. "That link is not there yet." Uber is not alone — Microsoft and Duolingo have also begun publicly questioning whether high AI adoption rates automatically translate to business outcomes.

Some AI firms are shifting pricing plans to capture increased AI usage. Anthropic changed its pricing model, moving away from a flat fee to a usage-based model, meaning autonomous agents are now charged per token of compute use. In March, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman articulated the industry's broader direction: "We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter."

Altman says AI did not destroy jobs as he predicted. He also says AI will be priced like a utility meter. Both statements cannot be the whole truth simultaneously. If AI is capable enough to be priced as essential infrastructure, it is capable enough to reshape employment at scale. The reversal on jobs and the advance on pricing are contradictions that no IPO prospectus will be required to resolve.

What This Means for GAFAM

The Altman-Amodei reversal has direct implications for every GAFAM company. Microsoft, Google, Meta and Amazon have all cited AI efficiency as a justification for layoffs — while simultaneously arguing that AI creates more jobs than it destroys. The AI job displacement narrative has been used selectively: invoked to justify headcount reductions, retreated from when it threatened to generate regulatory response or investor anxiety.

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has maintained a consistently different perspective throughout. Rather than changing his position, Solomon has argued since at least late 2025 that concerns about AI-driven job losses were overblown — and is now pointing to a century of American economic history to say he was right.

Solomon was consistent. Altman and Amodei were not. That inconsistency — in the leaders of the two most influential AI companies in the world — is the story that European policymakers should be reading most carefully.

The European Perspective