Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, made some big news this week. He said publicly what many in Big Tech have only been saying privately: advanced AI could cause massive job losses in the next one to five years. Amodei spoke to Axios, Fox News, and CNN, and sounded the alarm on what our economic future could look like.

He said that half of entry-level white collar jobs could be destroyed due to AI’s rapid development. The theory is that AI will be able to do many tasks that white collar workers do every day, and that companies will simply replace millions of their white collar workers with AI agents.

Amodei’s most shocking prediction is that the U.S. could face huge unemployment rates in the near future — as much as 20%. This would be a devastating impact on the American economy, and he is not the only one making such predictions. Bill Gates, for example, has been saying recently that human beings won’t be needed for “most things.”

Massive job losses due to automation is one of the major concerns of organizations like The Alliance for Secure AI. We are concerned about the potential impact on society if these predictions come true. Massive economic disruptions due to AI could tear at the social fabric that holds our country together. It could exacerbate social inequality and concentrate wealth and power in a few Bay Area Big Tech companies. It could lead to all sorts of social anxieties, animosity, and maladies.

As we work to integrate AI into our economy and society, leaders must heed these warnings from the very people who are developing advanced AI. It is not in the industry’s interest to “say the quiet part out loud” like this. But the handful of Big Tech companies that are developing frontier AI models are well aware that what they are building could have extremely disruptive consequences for the American people, and the world.