OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently publicly stated on the social platform He emphasized that "the doomsday view of work is likely to be wrong in the long run" and people will find new and more satisfying forms of work.
Over the past year or so, layoffs have occurred in various industries around the world, and both large and small companies have not been spared. Many executives even bluntly stated that AI has driven business restructuring and manpower reduction, exacerbating public anxiety about "AI grabbing jobs." A typical example is that King, the developer of Candy Crush Saga, laid off a team that had just completed the development of an internal AI tool that could generate game levels faster. As soon as the project was completed, they were fired and replaced by a system they built themselves. In July last year, job sites Indeed and Glassdoor were also revealed to have laid off 1,300 employees because their internal AI systems used to match candidates to positions performed so well that the relevant positions were “redundant.”
In this context, the view that “AI will eventually take over almost all jobs” has become widely spread, and has become one of the important reasons why many people are disgusted with this type of technology. Adding fuel to the fire are numerous public comments from Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (Claude's development company) - he has repeatedly said that humans are only "about six months (or six to 12 months)" away from a world where "AI writes almost all the code."
In the face of external concerns, Altman continued to elaborate on his position on He describes a future in which if you don't want to work hard, you "don't have to" but can still have a "prosperous and exciting life."
However, Altmann himself has received a lot of criticism for his work-related remarks before. He has been accused of calling many of the white-collar jobs replaced by AI “not really jobs” and comparing them to manual labor such as farming. In his opinion, if a farmer fifty years ago saw today's office work, he would probably not regard those daily tasks of operating keyboards and meetings as "real labor."
The “secret war” between Altman and Amodei has also lasted for many years around AI safety and commercialization paths. Amodei worked at OpenAI in his early years, but later became concerned about the company's security and commercialization practices. He left with his sister and many researchers around 2020/2021 and founded a new company Anthropic that claimed to be "more trustworthy." Since then, competition and differences between the two parties in the industry have continued to emerge.
Tensions between the two companies have escalated recently. The U.S. Pentagon previously canceled a contract with Anthropic, and OpenAI immediately "took over" the cooperation, drawing more attention to the relationship between the two organizations. At an AI summit held in India in 2026, when technology leaders and the Prime Minister raised their hands for a group photo to show unity, Altman and Amodei deliberately did not hold hands, using this detail to show a subtle opposition.
In the debate about AI and employment, on one side are real cases of continuous layoffs and replacement by automated systems, and on the other side is Altman’s vision that “AI will help humans move toward a more prosperous life.” At least judging from his latest public statement, OpenAI hopes to position itself as an "amplifier" and "assistant" for humans, rather than a "successor" that actively takes away human jobs.