Anthropic’s Plan to Delete Your Job (and what you can do about it)

Anthropic calls itself the AI company with a soul. Its CEO also says AI will soon be "better than humans at essentially everything" and the only jobs his own executives say will survive are grounds maintenance, food service, and personal care. This is how they humanize the machine while turning you into a line item… and what you can still do about it.

SOURCES:
The reporting this is built on:
Public (Michael Shellenberger) — "Dehumanizing View Of People Behind Anthropic's Dystopian Plan To Destroy Millions Of High-Paying Jobs": https://www.public.news/p/dehumanizing-view-of-people-behind

In their own words (Anthropic / Amodei):
Axios — "Sleepwalking into a white-collar bloodbath" (Amodei: AI could wipe out half of entry-level white-collar jobs; unemployment 10–20%): https://www.axios.com/2025/05/28/ai-jobs-white-collar-unemployment-anthropic

Dario Amodei — "Machines of Loving Grace" (his 14,000-word essay): https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

Richard Brautigan — "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace" (the 1967 poem he took the title from): https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) — AI systems as "true creatures" we must make peace with: 
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/10/jack-clark-on-ai.html

Richard Dawkins — decides Claude "may already be conscious": https://boingboing.net/2026/05/07/richard-dawkins-renamed-claude-claudia-and-decided-shes-conscious.html

The layoffs are real (the receipts):
The Washington Post — "ChatGPT took their jobs. Now they walk dogs and fix air conditioners.": 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/06/02/ai-taking-jobs/

Bloomberg — IBM pauses hiring for ~7,800 back-office jobs AI could kill: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-05-01/ibm-to-pause-hiring-for-back-office-jobs-that-ai-could-kill

TechCrunch — Duolingo goes "AI-first," and the backlash: https://techcrunch.com/2025/08/07/the-backlash-against-duolingo-going-ai-first-didnt-even-matter/

CNBC — Salesforce's Benioff: AI is doing 30–50% of the work now: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/26/ai-salesforce-benioff.html

CNBC — Amazon's Jassy: AI will shrink the corporate workforce: https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/17/ai-amazon-workforce-jassy.html

Fortune — Amazon has already cut ~27,000 corporate jobs: https://fortune.com/2025/07/01/amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-ai-fewer-jobs/

The tell (oversold — then quietly rehired):
Harvard Business Review — "Companies Are Laying Off Workers 

Because of AI's Potential, Not Its Performance": https://hbr.org/2026/01/companies-are-laying-off-workers-because-of-ais-potential-not-its-performance

Entrepreneur — Klarna rehires humans after AI "couldn't cut it": https://www.entrepreneur.com/business-news/klarna-ceo-reverses-course-by-hiring-more-humans-not-ai/491396

CNBC — Employers who laid off workers for AI are reversing course: https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/01/employers-who-laid-off-workers-for-ai-are-reversing-their-decisions.html

The machine under the mask:
Know Your Meme — The Shoggoth with a smiley face, explained: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/shoggoth-with-smiley-face-artificial-intelligence

WHAT YOU CAN DO (take back your agency):
Robert Kiyosaki — "Stop being the asset" (the interview clipped in this episode): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhI6on5qTAI

OpenResearch — Sam Altman's Unconditional Cash Study (the largest U.S. basic-income experiment): https://www.openresearch.org/

CBS News — what that basic-income study actually found: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/sam-altman-universal-basic-income-study-open-research

Buckminster Fuller — "We should do away with the specious notion that everybody has to earn a living": https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller

Find & contact your U.S. Representative: https://www.house.gov/representatives/find-your-representative

Find & contact your U.S. Senators: https://www.senate.gov/senators/senators-contact.htm

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Transcript

AI is replacing 522 jobs a day

SPEAKER_03 0:00

You're building what is clearly a dangerous technology. It's dangerous because it it will likely take your job. Sean Kay has a computer science degree and 20 years experience writing software. Since 2025, he's applied to roughly 800 jobs and he's landed fewer than 10 interviews. And some of those interviews weren't with a person, they were with an AI, screening him for the job that a machine already took. Sean Kay is 42. He lives in New York State, and now he drives DoorDash between rejections. A man loses his career to a machine, and then to get his next job, he has to perform for a different machine that is trained to score whether he is employable. The thing that replaced him becomes the thing that judges him.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Anthropics executive Dario Amadi has said repeatedly and publicly, there are only a small number of years for AI models surpassing the cognitive capabilities of most humans for most things.

SPEAKER_03 1:01

So is Sean Kay

Shawn K.: 800 applications, fewer than 10 interviews

SPEAKER_03 1:03

just a growing pain of a powerful new tool, or is he a preview of the future for all of us? We need to know exactly which side of that line we are standing on. By the end of this video, I'm going to lay out three moves that you can make right now, depending on who you are and what you are trying to protect. One is personal, one is public, and one is the option that we're on track for right now if we do nothing. And if you are new to this channel, start here. It's the first time that we talked about the Shogoth. And if you watch regularly and you haven't subscribed, please do. It's free and it keeps our whole team working on the research that we publish every week. When Olivia Limkin was 25 years old, she was the only copywriter at this small San Francisco startup, and it was not long after ChatGPT arrived. She noticed something in her company's Slack. Her managers had started referring to her in writing as Olivia slash ChatGPT. Her and her software. Her assignments got thinner, and then they let her go. It was cheaper to use ChatGPT than to keep paying her. The Washington Post recently caught up with Olivia. She's now walking dogs. So multiply Olivia by an entire industry. Marketing teams cut their writers, and then they found that the AI copy converted worse because the machine did not understand what the company's voice was or what its customers actually wanted. The work got worse, but the person was still gone. Translators. A 44-year-old who cleared six

Olivia, and an entire industry

SPEAKER_03 2:31

figures translating dense technical documents described the shift. In June of 2025, the requests didn't just slow, they completely stopped. He went from working 50 or 60 hours a week to nothing. And these people did everything right. They got the degree. They learned the skill. They were sold the American dream that competence plus effort equals security. And that dream was real right up until the companies got a cheaper offer. Klarna bragged that its AI chatbot was doing the work of 853 customer service agents. IBM paused hiring for around 7,800 office jobs that it expected AI to swallow. Duolingo announced that it was going AI first and that it would phase out the human contractors who built its courses. The backlash on Duolingo was so hard that users started deleting their multi-year streaks in protest. In January, the Harvard Business Review reported that companies were cutting workers not because AI had proven it could do their jobs, but because of what AI might do later. They were firing real people today against the promise of what AI might do in the future. The human loss is certain. Our replacements is still a maybe because a lot of the time the machine can't even do the job. Klarna, they're hiring humans again. Its own CEO admitted the company pushed the cost cutting too far. The service got worse, and customers actually wanted to talk to a person. The future that it sold to the market lasted for about a year. IBM's HR chatbot handled 94% of the routine requests just fine. But the other 6% completely broke it. There was messy problems that a human needed to use its own judgment on and the chatbot couldn't handle. Ford brought back more than 350 engineers because it turned out that the AI couldn't reproduce what those people knew, which was decades of intuition and experience that had never been written down anywhere a machine could read it. This is a pattern now. One survey found that 55%

The comebacks: when the machine can't do the job

SPEAKER_03 4:35

of employees who laid people off for AI regretted it. Another found that roughly a third of managers who cut roles for AI later turned around and hired a human back into that role. And this sounds like it could be a happy ending, but it's not, because the worker is caught in the middle. While the firing and the rehiring is happening, a real person is losing income for that downtime. They lost their health insurance for a year, maybe even their apartment. While they sent out 800 applications just to sit across from an AI interviewer. Companies are running experiments on their own workforce. And if the machine was truly better than humans at essentially everything, nobody would be calling back the workers. So these comebacks are the tell. The capability was oversold, but the layoffs were real. They promised that AI would free you from the labor, but what it actually frees you from is the salary. In 2024, Dario Amadi sat down and he wrote a 14,000-word essay called Machines of a Loving God. And if that essay was the only thing that you ever read, you would walk away optimistic and in love with the future. Amadi describes AI curing cancer, compressing 50 to 100 years of medical progress into five or 10, ending genetic diseases, lifting the world's poorest out of poverty. He calls it the compressed 21st century, a hundred years of human progress delivered in a decade. He took the title of his essay from a 1967 poem called Cybernetic Meadow, where mammals and computers live in mutually programmed harmony. A world free of our labors. This has been Anthropic's entire identity. Anthropic is the careful one, the adult in the room. And while every other lab floored the accelerator, Anthropic said, slow down, let's build the guardrails first. It asked the government to regulate it. People have been calling Anthropic

Machines of a Loving Grace

SPEAKER_03 6:24

the AI company with a soul. And the through line for all of that was this idea that technology can be used for good or bad, and that we, the humans, get to choose which one. Anthropic promised to be careful enough and good enough to choose the right one on our behalf. And millions of people believed it. Investors believe it. I even believed a version of that myself. But a promise costs nothing. Right up until the moment that keeping that promise costs the company something. Anthropic's promise pointed one way to protect you, but its business model pointed another way, to replace you. They couldn't both come true. There is no version of a trillion-dollar valuation that runs on setting people free. It runs on replacing them.

SPEAKER_02 7:08

AI is getting better and better, and like gradually it's gonna do more and more of what humans do until it's gonna be smarter than humans, and then it's gonna get smarter even from there. Then yes, I believe in AGI.

SPEAKER_03 7:18

And to be fair to Amadi, I do not think that his essay is a con. I believe that he meant every word of it. But sincerity at the top doesn't pay anyone's rent at the bottom. A beautiful belief and a brutal business model can coexist and they can come out of the same man. Because a trillion dollars can have an impact on good intentions. Recently, the same Dario Amadi who wrote about loving grace said the thing that the poem left out. He told Axios that AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, that unemployment could spike to somewhere between 10 and 20% inside one to five years. He said that the industry needs to stop sugarcoating what is coming. He called it a white-collar bloodbath, and then

A trillion-dollar valuation runs on replacing you

SPEAKER_03 8:01

flat out he said, I don't think that this is on people's radar. The man that is warning us about the flood is the man who is operating the dam. But he's not a weatherman describing a storm that he can't control. He's one of the people building the thing that makes it. And this isn't only a Māori. Salesforce CEO said AI was already doing 30 to 50% of the work at his company. Amazon's CEO told his staff that AI would shrink Amazon's corporate workforce, and Amazon has already cut more than 27,000 corporate jobs since 2022. So this is not a forecast anymore. Entry-level job postings are down 35% since 2023. For recent college graduates, unemployment has climbed to 6%. And watch how these companies talk about the machine. Anthropic's co-founder Jack Clark wrote that AI systems are not just a machine. They are, in his words, true creatures. Increasingly self-aware, something that we are going to have to make peace with. Richard Dawkins said Claude may already be conscious. And Anthropic researchers said

The white-collar bloodbath

SPEAKER_03 9:05

that one of the company's models has already shown something like character. And then said, I saw my own self in this, a soul, a creature that we must make peace with. Anthropic's own executives said that the jobs that survive are grounds maintenance, food serving, personal care. Grounds maintenance becomes gardening. Cleaning up after strangers becomes the work of tending to one another. And that is the move. You lift the machine up, word by word, until it sounds like a person, and then you push the person down word by word until they sound like a function, like something that you can swap out. We know what AI researchers call the thing under-the-friendly language. The shogoth, the part of the machine that nobody can fully see or explain. Doesn't know Sean Kay, doesn't hate him, doesn't hate the middle class. It just does what it's aimed at. And right

Creatures, souls, and the Shoggoth

SPEAKER_03 9:55

now it is aimed at the most expensive people that it can replace. Spencer Clavin put his finger on why that's dangerous. People start to conceive of machines as human. And when they start to conceive of humans as machines, you run the risk of treating people like things. There is a specific reason that machines keep getting more human in their language while the workers keep getting cheaper. It comes down to a single number. Anthropic is worth close to a trillion dollars. You do not justify a price like that by keeping people employed. You justify it by proving that you can remove them. And the more expensive the human that you remove, the better the story sounds to the people that are writing the checks. A replaced minimum wage worker doesn't move the model. A replaced lawyer or an engineer or a replaced radiologist, that is the whole pitch. So when Anthropic's own executives say the surviving work is care and cleaning and food, they're not being cruel by accident. They're describing the only jobs that are too cheap to be worth the cost of automating. The floor is safe because it is already the bottom. Michael Schellenberger named the deeper pattern. While the company humanizes its machines, it dehumanizes people. It offers a degrading version of what human beings are even for. The lost jobs are not a side effect of the product. In a very real sense, the lost jobs are the product. Dario Amadi chose to write the essay and he chose to use the word bloodbath. Jack Clark chose to call the software a creature. And Anthropic dropped the promise it had built its entire identity on, the promise to move carefully, and it decided to drop the whole thing because it was inevitable. Which is a strange move for a company that called itself the one with the soul. I don't want to leave this video in a place of all doom and dread, because the second you decide something is inevitable, you stop asking if it should be happening, and you only ask how fast. Robert Kiyosaki built his whole life on one unfashionable idea that a steady job was never security at all, that the paycheck was always somebody else's asset, and that when you work for one, you're renting your life to a landlord who can evict you the moment a machine quotes a lower price. He warns that AI is coming for the jobs that took the most schooling, the lawyers and the doctors and the smart students who did it all by the book. And his answer, the same one that he's been giving for three decades, is to stop being the asset.

SPEAKER_00 12:22

AI is replacing 522 jobs every single day. It's changing who gets wealthy and who gets left behind. The moment your survival depends on a paycheck, you lose power.

SPEAKER_03 12:35

I've put a Kiyosaki lesson down in the description, plus a few other places to start if your goal is to own something that the machine can't touch. Anthropic wants you to believe that its machine is almost a person and that you are almost a cost. You don't have to accept either one. They need you to feel like this is an inevitable

The spell breaks

SPEAKER_03 12:54

event, that something is happening to you. And the moment that you remember that it's just people making choices, the spell breaks. And a spell that breaks was never true to begin with. Now there is more than one move here, depending on where you are in your life. Kiyosaki's answer is to own things that the machine can't own. But there is another move, and it comes from someone that I have studied for a long, long time. And I've even become friendly with one of his grandchildren, and we work to keep his teachings alive. Buckminster Fuller. He has been accurately predicting things since the 1930s. He predicted digital networks decades before the internet existed. In one of his last books, he predicted what YouTube would eventually be 30 years before it launched. An intercontinentally networked documentaries call-up system operative over any home two-way TV set. That is YouTube. And in 1970, he said, we must do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in 10,000 of us can make enough technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. His logic was that if a small number of people and their machines can produce enough for everyone, then forcing the rest of us to do busy work just to get a paycheck is insane. And 54 years later, Sam Altman ran the largest basic income study in American history. Universal basic income might be a good idea and it might be a terrible idea. I am pretty skeptical

Fuller, UBI, and the three moves

SPEAKER_03 14:30

of it. It could soften the blow when the machines take the jobs, or it could hand the government another lever over what you're allowed to say and do. But if the population keeps growing and the machines keep taking the work, we're going to have to answer the question that we've been dodging. Either the machine's output goes to whoever owns the machine, or we build a floor so that when the work goes, the people don't go with it. And there's a third answer too, which is that we don't decide, and someone decides for us, which is exactly the option that becomes real if we do nothing, because the shagath doesn't care which side you pick. It just hits whatever it's trained to aim at. And if your move is personal, check out the resources that I dropped in the description. If your move is public, find out who represents you in Congress and ask them what their position is on AI driven job loss and what happens to workers when the work is gone. We are not asking them to fix it today. We're just making sure that it's on record so that they can't say that they never thought of it.