Sam Altman has taken to X to tell everyone that his company is not building robots to take your job. He claimed OpenAI's mission is to "augment and elevate" people, not create "entities to replace them."
This past year or so has been absolutely brutal with layoffs left and right. The job cuts have hit different industries and companies, both big and small, with many executives openly blaming AI for the restructuring.
For example, King, the maker of the super popular Candy Crush game, laid off the developers who had just finished building internal AI tools designed to generate Candy Crush game levels faster. The moment the project was done, the developers were fired and replaced by the system they built. Last July, AI took the jobs of the people whose job it is to help you find a job, when Indeed and Glassdoor cut 1,300 employees because their own internal AI got too good at matching candidates.
The sentiment that AI is totally going to take over every single job is widespread (perhaps that is why people resent it). This situation is made worse by Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic (the maker of Claude), who has repeatedly claimed that we are only "6 months" (or 6 to 12 months) away from a world where AI writes nearly all the code.
Sam Altman continued his X post, saying that "jobs doomerism" is "likely long-term wrong" because people will find new, more fulfilling work. He sketched out a future where, if you do not want to work hard, you "do not have to and" can still have an "amazing life of prosperity."
Altman had previously received backlash for suggesting many white-collar jobs being eliminated were "not real work" when compared to physical labor like farming. He said a farmer from fifty years ago would look at modern office work and not recognize it as legitimate labor.
There has been some sort of rivalry between Altman and Amodei for some years now. Amodei was previously an OpenAI employee but grew concerned with the company's approach to safety and commercialization. He left around 2020/2021 with his sister and other researchers to start a "more trusted" company, Anthropic.
The tension recently got nasty after the Pentagon canceled a contract with Anthropic, only for OpenAI to immediately swoop in and take it. During a 2026 AI Summit in India, when tech leaders raised their hands together for a unity photograph alongside the Prime Minister, Altman and Amodei pointedly refused to hold hands.
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