Job losses spurred by the AI increase are rising, and a gaggle of economists is now sounding the alarm that it may worsen.
A brand new group referred to as We Should Act Now launched an open letter on Monday, warning about “AI’s transformation of the economic system.” The open letter is signed by greater than 200 economists, and signees at the moment embrace sixteen Nobel Laureates, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the chief economists of each OpenAI and Anthropic.
The open letter urges tech leaders and policymakers to take pressing motion and tackle the impacts AI could have on the economic system now and sooner or later.
“AI could turn into radically extra highly effective over the subsequent 10 years,” reads the primary bullet level of the open letter.
“This might drive an unprecedented transformation of our economic system, bigger than the Industrial Revolution, however unfolding over a vastly shorter time-frame,” the open letter continues. “It might carry dangers, together with large-scale job displacement, in addition to alternatives corresponding to main beneficial properties in residing requirements.”
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We Should Act Now’s assertion concludes with a name to motion for leaders of each authorities our bodies and the tech business.
“Economists, policymakers and expertise leaders should act now to grasp the economics of transformative AI and to construct the incentives, guardrails, and establishments wanted to steer AI in a course that enhances people and advantages society,” reads the letter.
A report launched on the finish of final yr discovered that there have been 50,000 jobs misplaced attributable to AI in 2025, and this yr, Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Fiverr, Meta, Pinterest, and Snap have all introduced layoffs associated to AI. Because the expertise develops, AI-related job cuts are more likely to speed up, too. A survey from Might 2026 discovered that 99 p.c of executives among the many 12,000 respondents stated that they anticipated AI “to result in not less than some headcount discount within the subsequent two years.”
Some politicians are already engaged on the issue. California Governor Gavin Newsom took motion shortly after Meta laid off 8,000 workers, citing its AI push. Final month, Newsom shared that the state can be monitoring AI job losses and revealed California’s AI-Unemployment Tracker.
Nevertheless, the economists who signed on to the We Should Act Now letter would clearly prefer to see extra.
“AI capabilities are advancing far sooner than our understanding of the financial implications,” stated economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who organized the group alongside economists Ajay Agrawal, Tom Cunningham, and Anton Korinek. “In that hole lie the best alternatives of our period. We should act now to information AI to enrich people quite than merely imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the numerous, not simply the few.”
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