Obama and Bannon agree AI will be a white-collar job killer
The former president directed his nearly 130 million social media followers to articles about the prospect of AI reshaping the U.S. economy, including one where Steve Bannon issued the same warning
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Former President Barack Obama and Steve Bannon, a White House strategist during President Donald Trump’s first term, are both worried about the same thing: artificial intelligence displacing large numbers of white-collar workers.
Obama sounded the alarm on social media this weekend by directing his nearly 130 million followers to two recent articles that dove into the possibility of technological transformations reshaping the U.S. economy – one of which quoted Bannon issuing similar warnings.
“At a time when people are understandably focused on the daily chaos in Washington, these articles describe the rapidly accelerating impact that AI is going to have on jobs, the economy, and how we live,” Obama, the former two-term president, wrote on May 30.
The first article Obama cited came from Axios and centered around an interview with Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI startup Anthropic. Amodei warned the news outlet that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs, leading to unemployment rates of 10-20% in the next one to five years.
Amodei told Axios that the mass elimination of jobs could be in the offing, especially at the entry level across the technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar professions.
Bannon, a former top Trump 2016 campaign and White House aide who is now at podcaster, offered Axios a similar warning, saying AI will be a major issue in the 2028 presidential campaign.
“I don’t think anyone is taking into consideration how administrative, managerial and tech jobs for people under 30 — entry-level jobs that are so important in your 20s — are going to be eviscerated,” he said.
The article Obama mentioned also says experts in the AI space believe the U.S. government is not doing a great job of cautioning workers so as not create panic.
Trump has not addressed job losses due to AI, though he has championed the need for the US to dominate the AI space. The president also urged the House to pass a sweeping tax and policy package that he’s dubbed the “big beautiful bill” and which allocates $500 million to help modernize government with the help of AI. That legislation also would prevent states from implementing existing regulations – or making new ones – that shape how AI is used or developed.
There are currently no federal laws or regulations in the U.S. to regulate AI.
Obama also shared a separate New York Times article titled “For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here,” which notes that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains.
“Now’s the time for public discussions about how to maximize the benefits and limit the harms of this powerful new technology,” Obama wrote.
This is not the first time Obama has talked about AI having the potential to disrupt the white-collar job market. At the Sacerdote Great Names Series at Hamilton College in April in Clinton, New York, Obama told the school’s president that the more advanced AI models “can code better than let’s call it 60%, 70% of coders now.”“We’re talking highly skilled jobs that pay really good salaries and that up until recently has been entirely a seller’s market in Silicon Valley,” Obama said. “A lot of that work is going to go away.”
Swapna Venugopal Ramaswamy is a White House correspondent for USA TODAY. You can follow her on X @SwapnaVenugopal
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