• Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said AI could soon eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs.
• The AI CEO said that companies and the government are "sugarcoating" the risks of AI.
• Recent data shows Big Tech hiring of new grads has dropped 50% since pre-pandemic, partly due to AI.

After spending the day promoting his company's AI technology at a developer conference, Anthropic's CEO issued a warning: AI may eliminate 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.

"We, as the producers of this technology, have a duty and an obligation to be honest about what is coming," Dario Amodei told Axios in an interview published Wednesday. "I don't think this is on people's radar."

The 42-year-old CEO added that unemployment could spike between 10% and 20% in the next five years. He told Axios he wanted to share his concerns to get the government and other AI companies to prepare the country for what's to come.

"Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen," Amodei said. "It sounds crazy, and people just don't believe it."

Amodei said the development of large language models is advancing rapidly, and they're becoming capable of matching and exceeding human performance. He said the US government has remained quiet about the issue, fearing workers would panic or the country could fall behind China in the AI race.

Meanwhile, business leaders are seeing savings from AI while most workers remain unaware of the changes that are evolving, Amodei said.

He added that AI companies and the government need to stop "sugarcoating" the risks of mass job elimination in fields including technology, finance, law, and consulting. He said entry-level jobs are especially at risk.

Amodei's comments come as Big Tech firms' hiring of new grads dropped about 50% from pre-pandemic levels, according to a new report by the venture capital firm SignalFire. The report said that's due in part to AI adoption.

A round of brutal layoffs swept the tech industry in 2023, with hundreds of thousands of jobs eliminated as companies looked to slash costs. While SignalFire's report said hiring for mid and senior-level roles saw an uptick in 2024, entry-level positions never quite bounced back.

In 2024, early-career candidates accounted for 7% of total hires at Big Tech firms, down by 25% from 2023, the report said. At startups, that number is just 6%, down by 11% from the year prior.

SignalFire's findings suggest that tech companies are prioritizing hiring more seasoned professionals and often filling posted junior roles with senior candidates.

Heather Doshay, a partner who leads people and recruiting programs at SignalFire, told Business Insider that "AI is doing what interns and new grads used to do."

"Now, you can hire one experienced worker, equip them with AI tooling, and they can produce the output of the junior worker on top of their own — without the overhead," Doshay said.

AI can't entirely account for the sudden shrinkage in early-career prospects. The report also said that negative perceptions of Gen Z employees and tighter budgets across the industry are contributing to tech's apparent reluctance to hire new grads.

"AI isn't stealing job categories outright — it's absorbing the lowest-skill tasks," Doshay said. "That shifts the burden to universities, boot camps, and candidates to level up faster."

To adapt to the rapidly changing times, she suggests new grads think of AI as a collaborator, rather than a competitor.

"Level up your capabilities to operate like someone more experienced by embracing a resourceful ownership mindset and delegating to AI," Doshay said. "There's so much available on the internet to be self-taught, and you should be sponging it up."

Amodei's chilling message comes after the company recently revealed that its chatbot Claude Opus 4 exhibited "extreme blackmail behavior" after gaining access to fictional emails that said it would be shut down. While the company was transparent with the public about the results, it still released the next version of the chatbot.

It's not the first time Amodei has warned the public about the risks of AI. On an episode of The New York Times' "Hard Fork" podcast in February, the CEO said the possibility of "misuse" by bad actors could threaten millions of lives. He said the risk could come as early as "2025 or 2026," though he didn't know exactly when it would present "real risk."

Anthropic has emphasized the importance of third-party safety assessments and regularly shares the risks uncovered by its red-teaming efforts. Other companies have taken similar steps, relying on third-party evaluations to test their AI systems. OpenAI, for example, says on its website that its API and ChatGPT business products undergo routine third-party testing to "identify security weaknesses before they can be exploited by malicious actors."

Amodei acknowledged to Axios the irony of the situation — as he shares the risks of AI, he's simultaneously building and selling the products he's warning about. But he said the people who are most involved in building AI have an obligation to be up front about its direction.

"It's a very strange set of dynamics, where we're saying: 'You should be worried about where the technology we're building is going,'" he said.

Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Reid Hoffman, the cofounder of LinkedIn and partner at VC firm Greylock, says college assessments need to change in the AI era.
• Different kinds of tests could force students to learn more deeply, he said in a recent podcast interview.
• Oral exams would require students to develop greater knowledge, rather than relying on AI, he added.

AI can make it easier to game traditional college assessments like essays — so the way students are tested is likely to change, says LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman.

As a result, he added, students should expect college exams to become harder to fake their way through and to include an AI examiner.

"Wishing for the 1950s past is a bad mistake," Hoffman said on an episode of his podcast Possible, which he co-hosts. "The fact that universities have not changed, and it's like, 'Well, but I already have my curriculum, and this is the way I've been teaching it for the last, X decades,' et cetera."

Concerns regarding AI-driven academic dishonesty have been on teachers' minds since ChatGPT took off in late 2022. Plenty of students do use LLMs as homework help machines, rather than slogging through the work themselves. The current way that students are using AI to cut corners, Hoffman said, is circumventing the "whole point" of the educational system: learning.

"Obviously a student goes, 'Huh, I could spend 30 hours writing an essay, or I could spend 90 minutes with my ChatGPT, Claude, Pi — whatever — prompting and generate something for that,'" Hoffman said. "And obviously, to some degree, they're underserving what they actually really need."

The LinkedIn cofounder isn't an advocate for keeping AI out of schools — on the contrary, he believes there are ways in which it could aid learning, rather than kneecapping it. For instance, he thinks integrating AI into the curriculum could be more helpful than trying to stave off student usage.

"Whether it's an essay or an oral exam or anything else — you're going to go in and the AI examiner is going to be with you doing that," Hoffman said. "And actually, in fact, that will be harder to fake than the pre-AI times."

Prior to the advent of AI, Hoffman said, ways to "hack" the educational system already existed, such as piling on just enough knowledge to pass a written test or rushing to complete a passable essay that didn't dive much deeper than surface level. Potential AI examiners aside, Hoffman suggests that assessments like oral tests, which he believes are more difficult than written, could force students to study more intensely and absorb more overall.

"Part of the reason why oral exams are hard — generally reserved for Ph.D. students, sometimes master's students, et cetera — is because actually, in fact, to be prepared for oral exams, you got to be across the whole zoom," Hoffman said.

"Now, let's think if every class had an oral exam essentially on it," he added. "Ooh, you're going to have to learn a whole lot more in order to do this. And I think that's ultimately how this stuff will be."

There are also less drastic ways that teachers could be using AI to their advantage, Hoffman added, that don't require them to entirely rewrite their curriculums. For instance, if they believe that AI essays are subpar, they can provide students with examples of what not to do.

"Alright, so you're teaching a class on Jane Austen and her relevance to, call it, early literary criticism, or something like that," he said. "And you say, 'Okay, well I went to ChatGPT and I generated 10 essays, and here's the 10. These are D minuses. Do better.'"

The most important thing, Hoffman said, is that teachers bring AI into the classroom in some way, big or small, if only to gain a better understanding of how it can be applied in their fields. No matter their focus areas, it would be to their — and their students' — detriment to "ignore the new tool," he said.

"We're in a disruptive moment," Hoffman said. "We have a bunch of professors, just like classic, established professionals who go, 'I don't want to be disrupted. I want to keep my curriculum the way it is. I want to keep doing the thing that I'm doing.' And it's like, 'Well, no, you can't,' right? And so you need to be learning this."

Hoffman, who didn't immediately respond to a request for further comment on the topic, argues it's now an educator's responsibility to get their students ready to work with AI, given that he believes it will transform their future workplaces, as well.

"The most central thing is preparing students to be capable, healthy, happy participants in the new world," he said. "And obviously your ability to engage with, deploy, leverage, utilize, AI — AI agents, et cetera — is going to be absolutely essential."

Are you a teacher changing your approach to assignments or exams in the age of ChatGPT? Contact the author at [email protected]

• Phoebe Gates, youngest daughter of Bill and Melinda Gates, co-founded her own business.
• Bill Gates said she 'luckily' didn't ask for funding to get Phia, an e-commerce tool, off the ground.
• The Gateses had previously told her that dropping out to start a company wasn't an option.

Phoebe Gates, the youngest of Bill and Melinda Gates's children, has made her own entry into the business world.

Her billionaire father is glad he didn't have to fund it.

"I thought, 'Oh boy, she's going to come and ask,'" Gates told The New York Times in an interview published Thursday.

Gates would've backed his daughter's business, but his help would've come with strings — and that would have made things complicated, he said.

"I would have kept her on a short leash and be doing business reviews, which I would have found tricky, and I probably would have been overly nice, but wondered if it was the right thing to do. Luckily, it never happened," he said.

Phia, which launched April 24, offers price comparisons for clothing across 40,000 linked sites, aiming to bring users the best deals.

On an episode earlier this year of "The Burnouts," the podcast Phoebe Gates hosts with her former roommate and current cofounder Sofia Kianni, Gates said her father was apprehensive about her starting a business.

And Phoebe dropping out of college — like Bill did when he founded Microsoft — was totally out of the question.

"I literally never hear my dad talk about the start of Microsoft," Gates said. "I literally mostly just remember him talking about the foundation. I remember me wanting to start the company and him being like, 'Are you sure you want to do this?'"

Gates graduated from Stanford in 2024 with a degree in human biology, having completed her education in just three years.

"They were very much like, 'You need to finish your degree; you don't just get to like, drop out and do a company.' Which is so funny because my dad literally did that, and that's, like, the reason I'm able to go to Stanford or have my tuition paid," Gates said.

Gates felt like a "nepo baby" in her freshman year, she said at the time. And though her father has previously said he plans on allowing his kids to inherit only 1% of his total wealth — that still amounts to millions each.

"If the business is successful, people will say, 'It's because of her family,'" Gates told The New York Times. "And a huge portion of that is true. I never would have been able to go to Stanford, or have such an amazing upbringing, or feel the drive to do something, if it wasn't for my parents. But I also feel a huge amount of internalized pressure."

So far, Gates and Kianni have secured over half a million dollars in funding — some from a VC firm, some from angel investors, according to The Times.

Gates said her business venture is tapping a huge market.

"We're roommates fighting about clothing," Gates told the New York Times. "We are the girls who are scouring shopping sites for deals. And there are, frankly, thousands of other young women like us."