Yves Herman/REUTERS
Anthropic’s Dario Amodei is doubling down on his warning to entry-level workers.
In an interview on BBC Radical with Amol Rajan published on Thursday, the CEO said repetitive-but-variable tasks in law firms, consulting, administration, and finance could be eliminated in the next one to five years.
“Specifically, if we look at jobs like entry-level white, you know, I think of people who work at law firms, like first-year associates, there’s a lot of document review. It’s very repetitive, but every example is different. That’s something that AI is quite good at,” he said.
He also said many CEOs privately view AI as a way to cut costs — not just “augment” workers.
“I think, to be honest, a large fraction of them would like to be able to use it to cut costs to employ less people,” he said.
Amodei stressed that his one-to-five-year timeline isn’t about distant possibilities but about what’s already emerging.
The technology, he said, is “already very good at” entry-level work and “quickly getting better now.”
He added that his conviction stems in part from conversations with CEOs already rolling out AI tools, many of whom have said they want to use AI to reduce head count.
He’s doubled down on earlier warnings
Amodei has been sounding the alarm bell for months.
In May, he told Axios he believes AI could eliminate up to 50% of entry-level office jobs within five years, potentially pushing unemployment to 10-20%, and that industry and governments are “sugarcoating” what’s coming.
He’s also argued that the automative wave won’t be limited to back-office work.
In March, Amodei said at a Council of Foreign Relations event that AI could write 90% of software code within three to six months and “essentially all” of it within a year, with human engineers increasingly focused on design constraints rather than line-by-line programming.
The warnings have sparked a backlash and fueled a debate across the tech industry.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang dismissed Amodei’s bleak outlook at VivaTech in Paris in June, saying he disagreed with “almost everything” the Anthropic chief had said and predicting AI would change jobs rather than erase them.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman struck a similar note, saying society won’t allow half of jobs to vanish and that new, better roles will emerge.
Others remain divided. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff said he sees no evidence of a near-term jobs apocalypse, while Ford CEO Jim Farley forecast that AI would replace “literally half” of US white-collar workers.
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