Silicon Valley CEOs no longer talk about AI layoffs.

Source: The Wall Street Journal, compiled by BitpushNews

As public perception of AI turns negative, warnings about mass layoffs are decreasing

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the industry has underestimated our ability to keep "people-first" in everything.

A year ago, the message from many business leaders was that AI would completely destroy jobs. But in the past month or so, tech company CEOs have adopted a more optimistic tone.

In late May, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman—who has long predicted that AI would trigger dramatic changes in the labor market—said at a conference: "We were roughly correct on the technology predictions, but completely wrong on the social and economic impact."

Shortly after, he told CNBC: "Our industry has underestimated how we will remain people-first in everything."

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in May 2025 that AI could eliminate half of startup jobs. A year later, he emphasized a more positive scenario for companies adopting AI: "They can do the same thing with fewer resources, which leads to layoffs and such; or they can do more with the same resources. But that requires creativity."

In an article he published in June, he wrote that he issued warnings about job losses to give policymakers and the private sector the best chance to adapt—he did not intend to be a "doomsayer." (He also wrote that the possibility of "persistent unemployment" still exists.)

Is this more optimistic outlook an effort to win back customers and the public who are dissatisfied with AI's promise to "disrupt the world"?

Or is it that people now have a better understanding of AI's role in the workplace?

Some comments about AI's job-creation potential come as companies cut jobs to raise more funds for AI spending.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently told Complex that if companies focus on improving employee productivity faster than automation, "in theory, there should be more jobs in the future, not fewer." In May, the company began cutting 8,000 employees and streamlining teams.

In February, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy spoke to CNBC about AI's job-creation potential. A year earlier, he had announced that due to AI, the company would reduce its workforce over the next few years. Amazon said the subsequent 16k layoffs were not related to AI adoption but were aimed at continuing to reduce organizational layers and revitalize company culture.

Overall, the narrative has shifted from an AI-driven doomsday scenario of "staff reductions" to a future where workers can keep their jobs and gain productivity improvements.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei once issued warnings about AI-driven job displacement, but in a recent article, he said he did not intend to be a "doomsayer."

This shift in sentiment is not limited to tech leaders: An EY-Parthenon survey found that the proportion of CEOs who believe AI investments will lead to significant layoffs dropped from about 46% in January 2025 to 20% in May of this year.

"They may have noticed that the labor market has not changed as quickly as they expected (i.e., collapsed)," said David Autor, an economics professor at MIT. "They may have realized that declaring your great new product will destroy the economy is simply bad business strategy."

A recent study by fintech company Ramp and workforce intelligence firm Revelio Labs found that companies with the highest AI investment had employment growth rates about 10% higher than similar companies that have not adopted AI.

"I know that the companies adopting AI the most are also the ones hiring the most," Altman said in the CNBC interview. Some tech leaders say AI is even creating demand for certain jobs, and there will be more jobs in the future that do not yet exist.

Many prominent economists disagree on AI's long-term impact on employment.

Ford Motor CEO Jim Farley said last year that AI would replace "literally half of America's white-collar workers." The company recently hired hundreds of engineers, attributing the move to concerns about the quality of automated work. (These hires were previously reported by Bloomberg.)

"Engineers with deep technical expertise leveraging the power of AI is a powerful combination driving Ford's quality improvements," a Ford spokesperson said.

Under CEO Jim Farley, Ford Motor recently hired hundreds of engineers to address concerns about work automation.

Meanwhile, negative public sentiment toward AI is building. According to a recent poll by researchers at Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley, about 30% of Democrats believe the U.S. should accelerate AI innovation as quickly as possible, compared with about 50% of Republicans and 77% of tech founders.

"The tone of the conversation has changed," said Maurice Schweitzer, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who studies leadership and decision-making. "There was a lot of hype early on."

He said that between building data centers and government regulatory efforts around AI, "there is a political component to what they are trying to do."

There is also the issue of AI's actual performance in enterprises. Companies in tech and other fields are learning how long it takes to implement new AI tools and are working to better understand their effectiveness in handling tasks and workflows.

According to a survey of corporate executives by tech and management consulting firm Emergn, companies are struggling to determine which AI investments are successful. About 20% of U.S. leaders said the implementation reports they received were more optimistic than the facts warranted, with some reports "sugarcoating" bad news and employees staying silent about failures.

According to Stephen Henriques, senior fellow at the Yale CEO Leadership Institute, when a CEO talks about AI capabilities and expected returns on an earnings call, it may sound good, "but how it actually permeates the economy is another matter."

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has long predicted that AI will create new jobs. In June, he even suggested AI could lead to labor shortages. When asked in May on CNBC about people fearing AI replacing jobs, he said the reason people are afraid is that "all the smart people have been saying it."

Now, fewer people are saying it.