I love how narratives shift faster than Shakira's hips.
At the start of 2026, the year of the agent, the message from those running the most powerful AI companies in the world was unambiguous. Jobs were going. Sam Altman had been saying it since February 2019, plainly: AI will "probably replace most of the jobs people do today." By July 2025, standing before the Federal Reserve, he sharpened it. Entire job categories would be "totally, totally gone." Customer service was already dead, he said. You call, AI answers. The human is gone. Done.
Dario Amodei went further. On May 28, 2025, he told Axios that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years and spike unemployment to 10-20%. He did not whisper it. He said AI companies needed to stop "sugar-coating" what was coming. He doubled down in September. He doubled down again in January 2026, in a 20,000-word essay he titled "The Adolescence of Technology," warning that AI was a "general labor substitute for humans" that would create a lasting underclass of unemployed workers. As recently as Jan. 27, 2026, Amodei was still calling the disruption "unusually painful."
Then came May.
On May 5, 2026, Amodei stood on a stage in Lower Manhattan alongside JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon and introduced America to the Jevons Paradox. "If you automate 90% of the job," he said, "then everyone does the 10% of the job. And the 10% kind of expands to be 100% of what people do and kind of 10-times their productivity." Translation: Nobody loses a job. Everyone gets a better one. Three months from "unusually painful" to productivity multiplier.
Twenty-one days later, Altman was in Sydney at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference. He was "pretty wrong" about AI's economic impact, he said. "I'm delighted to be wrong about this. I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened." He said he had underestimated "the human part" of work.
Funny. He didn’t underestimate the human part known as panic when you tell someone they are about to lose their job, their house, their car, and maybe even that retirement they had planned.
No. Amodei and Altman's conversion just happened to coincide with Anthropic's confidential filing for an IPO. OpenAI moved the same month, targeting a valuation approaching $1 trillion.
There are no coincidences in Silicon Valley. They move in packs, much like hyenas converging on a cape buffalo.
The Yale Budget Lab, which tracks these metrics, found no meaningful change in unemployment through March 2026 among workers in jobs most exposed to AI. The data did not change between January and May. What changed was the roadshow.
From "white-collar bloodbath" to "productivity multiplier" in 90 days is not a scientific revision. Scientists revise when data changes.
PR teams revise when the prospectus needs to go out.
Greg Matusky is the Founder and CEO of Gregory, recognized as Agency of the Year by PR Daily, and host of The Disruption is Now, a podcast about how AI is reshaping the future of communications, work, culture, and the economy. Subscribe to the podcast on YouTube Music, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. Inquire if you’d like to be a guest on a future episode.