What Altman Actually Said

Speaking virtually at a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney on Tuesday, May 26, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CommBank CEO Matt Comyn he is "delighted to be wrong" about AI's impact on employment.

"I don't think we're going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about," Altman said, according to Reuters.

He went further: "I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened."

His explanation for why he was wrong? People actually want to interact with other people at work. The human element of jobs, Altman said, "can't be replaced by AI." According to TIME, he said this realization "updated me to thinking that the jobs picture is likely to be very different than we thought."

What He Said Before

This is a full reversal.

In 2023, Altman told The Atlantic that "jobs are definitely going to go away," according to Business Insider. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, he warned the technology would cause serious labor market disruption. As recently as 2025, Altman told a Federal Reserve conference that entire classes of jobs would disappear, per Business Insider.

In February 2026, Altman said companies were already claiming layoffs were due to AI — without naming them. That same month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei was warning AI could eliminate 50% of entry-level office jobs and push unemployment to 20% within one to five years, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

Now Altman says he was wrong. Amodei has NOT walked anything back.

The Timing Problem

Altman's reversal arrives at a very convenient moment. OpenAI is targeting $280 billion in revenue by 2030, up from $25 billion today, according to TIME. Anthropic is reportedly in talks for $30 billion in funding at a $900 billion valuation, per the Financial Times. SpaceX is eyeing a $1.5 trillion IPO valuation.

Three of the biggest AI companies on earth are heading toward major capital raises simultaneously. Telling investors your product will eliminate tens of millions of jobs creates regulatory risk, political backlash, and consumer anxiety. None of those are good for an IPO roadshow.

Altman acknowledged the optics himself, per the Daily Caller: "People are like, 'Oh, you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom.'" His response was essentially: I believed it at the time.

Maybe he did. But the incentives now point in one direction.

Meanwhile, in the Real World

While Altman walked back apocalypse talk in Sydney, Australian logistics software company WiseTech was busy announcing it is cutting one-third of its workforce, according to the Sydney Morning Herald.

WiseTech's new CEO Zubin Appoo put it bluntly in February: "The era of manually writing code as a core job activity is over." The company is "halving the human capacity" while scaling up through agentic AI — AI that acts on its own rather than just responding to prompts.

The backlash has been severe enough that WiseTech reported "threats of violence" against Appoo to police this week and increased security at its Sydney headquarters, per the Sydney Morning Herald.

So Altman says no jobs apocalypse. WiseTech is living one. Both things are happening simultaneously.

What Mainstream Coverage Gets Wrong

Most outlets are treating Altman's reversal as a feel-good story — the scary AI boss admits he was wrong, phew.

Not one major outlet led with the fact that Anthropic's Dario Amodei is STILL predicting 20% unemployment from AI displacement — and has NOT reversed course. That's a massive split between the two dominant AI labs, and it's getting buried.

Also buried: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang reportedly mocked "God complex" AI executives pushing doomsday job predictions, per the Sydney Morning Herald. That's a direct shot at both Altman and Amodei — from the man whose chips power all of their products.

The Axios story on the OpenAI-Anthropic split was inaccessible due to a Cloudflare block at time of publication.

What Comes Next

Altman's reversal is notable. A CEO of his stature publicly saying "I was wrong" is unusual enough to be newsworthy on its own.

But regular people should watch what AI companies do, not what their CEOs say at bank-sponsored conferences in Sydney. WiseTech is cutting a third of its staff. AI coding tools are eliminating entry-level developer jobs in real time. Whether this is an "apocalypse" or a "transition" depends almost entirely on whether the new jobs materialize fast enough to absorb the displaced workers.

Altman says he now thinks high-level human supervision of AI will be "a significant part" of what most people do in the future. He might be right. He might be wrong again.

He's already admitted his track record on this isn't great.