Sam Altman Says He’s ‘Delighted To Be Wrong’ About AI’s Impact On Jobs

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said Tuesday that the impact of artificial intelligence is unlikely to cause a “jobs apocalypse.”

Altman spoke virtually at the Commonwealth Bank Conferences in Sydney, Australia, where he discussed his initial concerns about entry-level white-collar jobs being taken over by artificial intelligence, Reuters reported.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level-white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman told Commonwealth Bank Conferences Matt Comyn in a Tuesday interview, according to the Economic Times.

“I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some companies in our space advocate or talk about,” the CEO said at the Sydney conference according to Reuters.

This comes after the OpenAI chief expressed concerns about jobs in the past. In 2023, in an interview with The Atlantic he said, “jobs are definitely going to go away,” in response to AI impacts, according to Business Insider. When ChatGPT was released in 2022, he claimed that AI was going to cause trouble in the job market.

In 2025, Altman told the Federal Reserve Conference that entire classes of jobs would disappear, the outlet reported.

In February, Altman said that companies were claiming layoffs due to AI, but did not identify the companies, according to Business Insider.