The biggest political issue of the next decade may not be immigration, inflation, or even foreign wars. It may be something just now bubbling to the surface of the discourse in Washington: the rise of artificial intelligence and the millions of white-collar jobs it threatens to erase.
Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic and one of the foremost minds in artificial intelligence, recently sounded the alarm about this potential crisis in an interview with Axios. His message was blunt: “AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs — and spike unemployment to 10-20 percent in the next one to five years.” He warned that the American public is sleepwalking toward a mass economic dislocation that could reorder society.
“Most of them are unaware that this is about to happen,” he said. “It sounds crazy, and people just don’t believe it.”
Believe it. Because the future Amodei describes is already beginning to unfold.
For decades, Americans were told that automation would primarily threaten blue-collar workers. But with the rise of generative AI and “agentic” systems – AI models that can independently execute complex human tasks – we’re seeing an unprecedented encroachment into white-collar professions. As Axios reported, tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are racing to develop AI that can outperform humans in tasks ranging from legal review and financial analysis to software engineering and marketing.
The results are staggering. In one case highlighted by The New York Times, a startup employed a single data scientist to complete work that used to require 75 people. Some firms report halting the hiring of junior staff altogether, relying instead on AI tools to handle lower-level tasks
Largely as a result, unemployment among recent college grads has surged to 5.8 percent, with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York warning that their job prospects have “deteriorated noticeably.” The long-touted “ladder to success” is being pulled up digitally and perhaps permanently.
This is not a left-versus-right issue. Even sworn political enemies like Barack Obama and Steve Bannon are ringing the same alarm bells. In a rare moment of bipartisan concern, Obama warned in a social media post late last month that Americans must urgently grapple with how AI is “rapidly accelerating” changes to “jobs, the economy, and how we live.”
Bannon, speaking to Axios, was equally forceful. “I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” he said.
This isn’t fearmongering – it’s math. AI models are scaling exponentially. Anthropic’s latest model, Claude Opus 4, can code autonomously for hours, rivaling teams of high-paid engineers.
According to the Times, some graduates aren’t even bothering with traditional jobs anymore. They’re launching AI-driven startups instead, aware that the conventional 10-year corporate climb may be obsolete soon. As one 23-year-old Stanford grad explained, “If the amount of leverage you have as a human becomes very small, a lot of career paths that don’t pay off for many years aren’t worthwhile.”
And yet, Congress is nearly silent. Regulations are almost nonexistent. CEOs are whispering behind closed doors about AI displacing workers – and now openly talking to major media outlets. As Amodei put it, “You can’t just step in front of the train and stop it… the only move that’s going to work is steering the train.”
The parallels to globalization are striking – and chilling. In the 1990s and 2000s, American manufacturers were gutted as blue-collar jobs were outsourced overseas. While the political and corporate elites praised “free trade,” working-class communities and factory towns collapsed.
Now, AI threatens to do the same thing to white-collar professionals. Only this time, it could happen even faster and across a broader spectrum of the economy.
One Brookings Institution expert warned the Times that AI is already replacing “marketing analysts, finance analysts and research assistants.” And Axios described a not-so-distant future in which AI agents are deployed en masse to replace humans in everything from customer support to legal document review and software architecture, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the overhead.
Some have argued that all of this is overblown, and that AI has the potential to be a force for good. And indeed it does – AI could revolutionize medicine, education, and economic productivity. As Amodei pointed out, an AI future is one where “cancer is cured, the economy grows at 10 percent a year, the budget is balanced.”
But, he continues, it is also a future where “20 percent of people don’t have jobs.” Economic gains will mean little if the careers of millions of Americans are rendered economically irrelevant.
The political implications are profound. A labor market upended by AI could make traditional policy fights over taxes and entitlements seem quaint by comparison. If tens of millions of white-collar workers lose their jobs, the question becomes not just how to retrain them, but how to preserve a democratic system where the average citizen retains economic leverage. (If you think wealth inequality is bad now, just imagine a future where company executives don’t have to pay millions of workers.)
“If that’s not present,” Amodei warns, “I think things become kind of scary. Inequality becomes scary. And I’m worried about it.”
Republicans need to lead. President Trump has rightly prioritized American dominance in the AI space, proposing a $500 million modernization effort through his “Big Beautiful Bill.” But winning the AI race against China means more than building better models – it means protecting the American workforce from collapse.
The GOP has a chance to show it learned the lessons of the last outsourcing wave. It can be the party that brings common-sense regulation to AI development, supports industry transparency, and ensures the benefits of this new technology are broadly shared. Amodei has even proposed a “token tax” on AI usage to fund economic stabilization programs – a radical idea, but one that reflects the scale of the threat that lies ahead.
The AI revolution is not five or ten years away. It’s now. And if conservatives want to preserve free markets, free citizens, and a functional democracy, they must act quickly to steer this technological freight train in a direction that benefits American workers.
Shane Harris is the Editor in Chief of AMAC Newsline. You can follow him on X @shaneharris513.
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