The AI jobs apocalypse, long predicted by tech leaders and AI critics alike, has never felt closer. A major job market disruption has been rumored for years now, but given the latest swings on Wall Street and major layoffs roiling the tech industry, the alarm bells are starting to go off.
It’s looking likely that not every profession will be hit in the same way, nor to the same extent — a topic that frontier AI companies have been studying intensely.
Last week, while the company’s CEO was engaged in a major fight with the Pentagon, Anthropic released its latest findings about the “labor market impacts of AI.” The company found that while “AI is far from reaching its theoretical capability” and “actual coverage remains a fraction of what’s feasible,” many occupations are at higher risk of “AI displacement.”
By taking into consideration “theoretical [large language model] capability and real-world usage data,” the team concluded that computer programmers, customer service reps, data entry keyers, medical record specialists, and market research analysts were at the highest risk since they were the “most exposed” to AI’s capabilities.
Other affected occupations include investment analysts, software quality assurance, and information security analysts, as well as computer user support specialists.
Anthropic found that workers in these most exposed professions are “more likely to be older, female, more educated, and higher-paid,” highlighting gaps around gender, education, and more as the effects of AI on the job market come into focus.
The finding echoes previous research that similarly found women-dominated occupations are more vulnerable to AI disruption in the workforce.
On the other end of the spectrum, the least exposed categories include professions that rely on a physical presence, and include cooks, mechanics, lifeguards, bartenders, dishwashers, and dressing room attendants, according to Anthropic — noble careers, but not ones known for paying particularly well.
There’s nothing particularly new about the conclusion that programmers are far more at risk from being made redundant by AI tech. Silicon Valley titans have been laying off thousands of workers as they continue to double down on their sizable investments in data centers.
Most recently, Twitter founder and Block CEO Jack Dorsey laid off nearly half the staff at his fintech company, citing “intelligence tools we’re creating” that are allowing for “smaller and flatter teams.”
“Within the next year, I believe the majority of companies will reach the same conclusion and make similar structural changes,” Dorsey wrote in a statement on X-formerly-Twitter last month.
But how much advancements in AI tech are really contributing to the layoffs remains a subject of heated debate. Former Block employees, for instance, have come forward to claim that the Dorsey-led layoffs were more likely an instance of “corporate downsizing” after a rash of pandemic-era overhiring.
As Anthropic itself admits, we are still nowhere near AI’s “theoretical capability,” meaning the wave of job losses may not be due to AI automation. Then there’s all of the noise that could make it extremely difficult to gauge how many jobs were actually lost to AI or due to other, unrelated factors, like rising geopolitical instability, for instance, triggering economic uncertainty.
Nonetheless, the company’s foreboding forecast highlights a rapidly changing labor landscape as colleges and universities face an existential threat, undermining the value of degrees. Computer science and computer engineering students, in particular, could be in deep trouble as employers continue to double down on AI.
Instead, according to Anthropic’s analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, they’d be better served becoming electricians, registered nurses, lawyers, and accountants — the occupations expected to grow the most between 2024 and 2034.
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