Anthropic Co-Founder, OpenAI CFO Sign Letter Warning AI Will Eliminate Jobs, Return to Offices

NEW YORK — More than 200 economists, including 15 Nobel laureates, published an open letter Tuesday urging immediate policy action on artificial-intelligence-driven labor displacement, warning that workers face disruption "arriving faster than our institutions can adapt." Among the signatories were OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar and Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, both of whom signed using their institutional email addresses.

The letter, organized by economists Anton Korinek and Erik Brynjolfsson, calls for expanded income support, retraining programs, and new worker protections to address displacement caused by AI systems of the kind currently being built, deployed, and actively sold by the companies where Friar and Clark hold executive positions.

In a statement, Anthropic said Clark signed in his personal capacity, that the company supported robust public debate on AI's economic impacts, and that none of this should be interpreted as an institutional view on whether Anthropic's products specifically would eliminate jobs. Anthropic did not specify which products, if not its products, the letter was about.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company's careers page listed eleven new engineering roles posted since Monday.

The letter's fifteen Nobel laureates described the AI-industry signatories as "a meaningful signal of how seriously the field takes this issue." A senior economist involved in organizing the effort said he was glad the AI companies were represented at the table and confirmed he had not asked what they planned to do differently as a result.

"It's meaningful that they signed," said economist Daron Acemoglu, himself a signatory. "Whether it is meaningful in the other sense of the word is a question I have chosen not to pursue."