Two of the most influential executives in artificial intelligence have reversed their most alarming predictions about AI-driven job losses, just as their companies prepare for blockbuster IPOs.
According to reports, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, speaking at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia event in Sydney on May 26, said he was “pretty wrong” about AI’s impact on white-collar employment. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman said. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this.”
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei last year warned that AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs and push unemployment into double digits. Amodei has recently reframed AI automation as a productivity multiplier rather than a job destroyer.
More recently, Fortune reported that Amodei is “walking back” his earlier AI-jobs-apocalypse messaging and now emphasizes AI’s productivity gains. “If you automate 90% of the job, then everyone does the 10% of the job,” he said. “And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity”.
Read more: Why are there so many layoffs? Don’t buy the claims
IPOs on the horizon
Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly preparing IPOs this year, with estimated valuations of $1 trillion and $380 billion, respectively, according to reporting on OpenAI’s potential Q4 2026 listing and Anthropic’s planned 2026 offering. Vijay Vijayasankar, global agentic AI officer at Genpact, wrote on LinkedIn that the walk-back carries a market logic beyond honest reassessment.
“Labor-based industries all took a serious hit in the public markets after Sam and Dario predicted the apocalypse of white-collar jobs,” Vijayasankar wrote. “Investors must have felt that a dollar invested in a services company is a proxy for shorting Anthropic or OpenAI. Now, as they near IPOs, they have both entered the services business.”
Vijayasankar also noted that “every AI leader who has proclaimed the death of white collar jobs has been hiring plenty of such labor in their companies.”
As HR Executive has reported, many layoffs labeled AI-driven are not what they appear. Forrester’s Predictions 2026: The Future of Work found that many companies attributing cuts to AI don’t have mature systems ready to fill those roles, and the researchers predict that the pattern will be reversed in more than half of such cases.
A Resume.org survey of 1,000 U.S. hiring managers reinforced that 59% of companies admit they emphasize AI’s role when explaining layoffs because it resonates better with stakeholders than citing financial constraints. However, in reality, only 9% say AI has fully replaced certain roles.
Read more | The truth behind AI-driven layoffs: 90% of companies aren’t ready
HR is being asked to solve the wrong problem
Industry analyst Josh Bersin, speaking at HR Tech Europe 2026, said that “the fact that some jobs may go away isn’t really the point. By the way, let’s suppose you did get rid of a third of your HR department,” he said. “Would that really make the material financial difference to your company? Probably not that much, a little bit.”
Bersin argues that companies focused on headcount reduction as the primary AI win miss the performance opportunities. “The actual work that somebody does in a job is not really written down in the job description,” he said. This suggests that the standard playbook of organizing tasks, identifying what AI can automate and calculating positions to eliminate does not reflect how work actually gets done.
Vijayasankar’s closing note on LinkedIn may suggest what’s next. “The next shoe to drop hopefully will be the luminaries getting realistic on [Artificial General Intelligence],” he wrote.
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