There’s no shortage these days of stories, posts and videos warning of the robot armies readying to vacuum up white-collar jobs in technology, finance, marketing, you name it. And there’s no doubt that artificial intelligence is rapidly changing how we live and work. Amid all this, though, a relative calm has descended on the labor market and should persist for the rest of this year, at least.
For workers, there were two fears coming into 2026. First, that a continued cooling in job growth would push the unemployment rate higher for a fourth straight year, and second, that rapid progress in AI would accelerate job losses. On both fronts, there are reasons to be less concerned.
Labor market data is arguably more stable now than at any time since the Federal Reserve began raising interest rates in 2022 to quell surging inflation. The unemployment rate is back to where it was last summer, having fallen modestly since the federal government shutdown late last year. Initial weekly jobless claims are at very low levels despite the ongoing economic and financial shocks from the war in Iran, and the number of people continuing to claim unemployment benefits is no longer rising compared with a year prior. As Fed Governor Christopher Waller noted in a speech last week, we now have a better understanding of how little the labor force is growing, meaning that it doesn’t take much hiring to keep it in balance.
Still, AI anxiety has, if anything, ratcheted up this year, which is understandable given the headlines. Two months ago, a report by Citrini Research rattled markets as it walked through a scenario in which AI would lead to massive white-collar job losses within 18 months. Last week, Anthropic PBC’s Chief Executive Officer Dario Amodei said he worried that half of entry-level jobs in areas including technology, finance and consulting will be first augmented and then replaced by AI systems in as little as one to five years.
Note the runaway success of Anthropic’s Claude services, which helped raise its revenue run rate to $30 billion from $9 billion at the end of 2025. It’s not hard to extrapolate what that kind of growth could mean for workers in the not-too-distant future.
Still, the rapid growth in AI has come with challenges for both companies such as Anthropic and for the customers using their products. If nothing else, this should buy time for workers before we see any large-scale job disruptions.
It’s unclear, for example, whether Anthropic has the resources needed to manage the growing demand for its offerings in the short run. The company recently decided to charge power users based on usage rather than a flat subscription fee as compute-intensive products such as Claude Code rapidly raise costs. There have also been a growing number of complaints related to model performance and site reliability as demand has surged. Separately, the Wall Street Journal reported on a “sharp capacity crunch” in computing that could limit the utility of new AI tools.
“Compute has emerged as the binding constraint on scaling AI,” analysts at Goldman Sachs Group Inc. noted in a report last week.
On the customer side, AI is becoming a more significant line item on company budgets. Tokenmaxxing — or the extreme use of tools including Claude, OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Alphabet Inc.’s Gemini — by employees anxious to show they’re not technological dinosaurs is taking off, according to Kevin Roose at the New York Times. But tokenmaxxing and surging Anthropic revenues mean corporations are rapidly increasing their AI spending, which will quickly become big enough to warrant management and investor scrutiny.
Expect companies to start trying to get a better handle on how productive these tools are as costs mount and to be more discerning about how they are rolled out. Further muddying the waters is AI-washing by executives who prefer to blame the technology for any job cuts, no matter the true drivers, because that’s viewed more favorably by investors.
Economists at Wells Fargo & Co. see AI-related headwinds concentrated among entry-level white-collar workers, even as opportunities for more experienced employees are either unchanged or have improved. “AI seems to be reshaping the composition of labor demand rather than reducing it outright,” a team led by Chief Economist Tom Porcelli wrote this week.
If workers are going to be concerned about what AI will mean for their jobs, it’s not the boom they should worry about, it’s the bust. Job losses due to technological disruption tend to come in recessionary bursts rather than in a linear fashion. Ernie Tedeschi, chief economist at Stripe LLC and a former Bloomberg Opinion columnist, recently made this point using the example of travel agents. In the case of travel agents, employment fell rapidly only during and after the 2001 recession, not during the late 1990s internet boom.
AI risks are likely similar. Corporate profits remain high, and while some companies are cutting costs to fund their AI spending, their revenues continue to grow. The kinds of labor-market stresses associated with declining revenues, profits and stock prices remain at bay. In the near term, a compute shortage will also restrain how quickly the most technologically sophisticated models can be adopted.
For workers, this year may end up being something akin to passing through the eye of a hurricane — a brief reprieve before a coming storm.
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