AI Might End Badly — But Here’s Some Short-Term News To Brighten Your Day

A wave of doomsday warnings about artificial intelligence (AI) is overshadowing a short-term bright spot: the technology appears to be creating American jobs even as it eliminates others.

U.S. employers cited AI in 116,175 announced job cuts through August, roughly 22% of all cuts announced in 2026, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Yet amid mounting warnings about AI’s threat to workers and even humanity, The Economist estimated in September that AI has created roughly 1 million American jobs compared with roughly 200,000 AI-attributed layoffs since mid-2023 — a ratio of about five jobs created for every one lost.

The figures are not directly comparable. Challenger tracked announced layoffs in which AI was cited as a reason, while The Economist estimated job creation using employment trends, AI-specific occupations and infrastructure hiring. Challenger has recorded roughly 188,000 announced cuts attributed to AI since it began tracking AI separately in 2023.

The broader labor market has so far avoided mass displacement. Employers added 162,000 jobs in August and the unemployment rate remained at 4.1%, the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported Sept. 4.

AI-related job creation is also extending beyond the workers constructing the data centers needed to power the technology.

The Economist tracked engineers, software developers, mathematicians and data scientists and estimated those occupations added roughly 730,000 jobs above the broader trend in professional employment since 2022. The outlet cautioned that AI could not be credited with all of those jobs, but pointed to growing demand for AI engineers, data annotators, “forward-deployed” engineers who adapt AI systems for customers and corporate AI executives.

LinkedIn separately estimated roughly 640,000 new AI-specific jobs were created between 2023 and 2025, according to The Economist. Preliminary research from Burning Glass Institute Chief Economist Gad Levanon also estimated that jobs that would not exist without AI now account for roughly 1% of professional jobs in the U.S. and between 4% and 5% of computer and life-sciences occupations.

Some occupations previously considered vulnerable to AI have also continued growing. Employment among paralegals increased roughly 11% between 2023 and 2025, while market-research analyst employment rose about 6%, compared with roughly 2% employment growth nationally over the period, according to The Economist’s analysis.

Data-center job postings more than doubled since 2023, rising from roughly two of every 1,000 U.S. job postings to six of every 1,000, according to Indeed Hiring Lab. About one-quarter of data-center openings were for installation and maintenance workers, while hourly installation jobs at data centers advertised median pay 42% higher — roughly $10 more per hour — than comparable jobs elsewhere.

Private data-center construction spending reached a $59.3 billion seasonally adjusted annual rate in May, up 23% from a year earlier, according to Census Bureau data cited by Indeed. Meta also launched a $115 million workforce program in June to train Americans for skilled-trade jobs supporting data-center construction, including electricians, plumbers, welders and fiber technicians.

The power buildout is creating another source of labor demand. The BLS projected utilities would be the fastest-growing major U.S. industry sector from 2025 through 2035, increasing employment 9.8%, or 58,800 jobs. The agency said nearly all of that growth was expected in electric power generation, transmission and distribution because of rising electricity demand, including demand from AI.

The BLS also projected employment among computing infrastructure providers, data-processing and web-hosting firms would increase 25.1% through 2035, adding roughly 120,400 jobs.

“Hiring has also increased over last year by 25%, so while AI is shifting the labor market, it is not dismantling it,” Andy Challenger, chief revenue officer at Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in the firm’s July jobs report.

The gains were not evenly distributed. Microsoft announced thousands of layoffs as the company reorganized amid the AI boom.

BLS projected office and administrative-support employment would fall 4% through 2035, shedding about 752,100 jobs. The agency said companies’ growing use of automation tools, including generative AI capable of handling repetitive tasks, was expected to reduce demand for several office occupations.

The employment data came amid a new wave of warnings about AI’s potential dangers. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei called for companies to slow development of frontier AI models on Saturday, warning that capabilities were advancing faster than researchers’ ability to understand and control them, while OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk also backed slowing development. Former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon resigned days earlier while warning that leading AI companies were taking unacceptable risks in their pursuit of increasingly powerful systems. The warnings helped send AI-linked technology stocks lower Monday.