Who Is Actually Advising the Fed on AI and Jobs? A Layoff CEO, a VC, and a Stanford Economist on Leave at Anthropic.

The Fed's AI Jobs Panel Has a Credibility Problem

The Federal Reserve recently named three industry figures to lead its productivity and jobs task force, charged with assessing how artificial intelligence affects the labor market and informing monetary policy. The panel: Asha Sharma, the newly appointed CEO of Xbox; Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz; and Charles I. Jones, a Stanford University economics professor currently on leave to work at Anthropic.

The timing of Sharma's appointment is hard to defend. Days before the Fed announced the advisory panel, she told Microsoft employees that 3,200 jobs would be cut across its gaming studios, according to Engadget. She moved to Xbox from Microsoft's Core AI group, and Engadget notes that the layoffs reflect an ongoing pattern at Microsoft rather than a policy she initiated. The context is important, but it doesn't change the appearance: the Fed picked someone mid-layoff to advise on how AI affects employment.

Andreessen has been a vocal booster of AI and tech investment with little track record of critical analysis on the displacement question, per Engadget's assessment. Jones is a credentialed economist, but his current employer is Anthropic, one of the companies whose labor-market impact the panel is supposed to evaluate objectively.

No charges of wrongdoing have been filed, and no investigation has been announced regarding any of the three appointments. These are judgment calls, not crimes. But they are bad judgment calls.

The Policy Response Is Thin

The advisory panel exists inside a broader vacuum. As The Atlantic reported, the Labor Department rolled out an AI literacy course this spring built around text messages, hippo-drawing exercises, and prompts to ask a chatbot for "side hustle ideas." Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has called AI "a general labor substitute for humans," not a replacement for specific narrow tasks. That's a significant claim about scope. The government's response so far has not matched it.

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would require the federal government to hold a 50 percent stake in major AI companies including Anthropic and OpenAI, with an appointed commission holding voting shares to prevent mass layoffs. The surprising detail, reported by The Atlantic: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman requested a meeting with Sanders after the proposal dropped and signaled openness to a diluted version of the idea.

The Strongest Counter-Argument Deserves a Straight Hearing

Before writing off the AI-layoff panic as overblown, the concern needs to be stated fairly. Consultancy Forrester projects AI will replace roughly 6% of U.S. jobs by 2030, or about 10.4 million positions, according to ZDNet. The Boston Consulting Group puts displacement in the 10-15% range. Amodei, though he has since modified his phrasing, warned in 2025 that half of entry-level white-collar jobs could disappear. If any of those projections are directionally correct, the current policy apparatus—a texted hippo exercise and a task force stacked with AI investors—is nowhere near adequate.

What the Data Actually Shows Right Now

A paper published at the end of June from financial operations platform Ramp and workforce data company Revelio Labs offers a meaningful data point in the other direction. The study tracked more than 21,000 U.S. firms and found that companies classified as high-intensity AI adopters—defined not by handing out chatbot subscriptions but by sustained, above-average AI spending—grew headcount by 10.2% in the two years following adoption. Entry-level hiring at those same companies grew by 12%.

Ramp lead economist Ara Kharazian told ZDNet the average monthly AI spend at high-intensity adopters was $33.67 per employee, versus $2.78 at low-intensity adopters. The implication: companies treating AI as a core operational investment are hiring more people, including recent graduates, not fewer.

"Young people, especially, are very well positioned to show that they can introduce these new technologies and apply them effectively to the workplace," Kharazian told ZDNet.

This doesn't disprove displacement risk at a macro level. Ramp is a financial software company with an inherent interest in business adoption narratives. The study covers a two-year window that may not capture delayed displacement. And aggregate hiring at AI-forward companies doesn't tell you what happens to workers at companies that are slow to adapt, or to industries where AI substitution is more direct. ZDNet reported the data straight, which is fair. But one corporate-sponsored study does not settle the forecasting debate.

The Unresolved Question

The Fed's task force is supposed to produce guidance that shapes monetary policy decisions affecting interest rates, credit conditions, and labor market interventions. If the panel's composition means it is unlikely to generate a genuinely critical assessment of AI-driven displacement because two of its three members have direct financial stakes in AI's continued expansion, then the policy judgments downstream will be built on a compromised foundation. Whether the Fed's board will weigh that conflict when evaluating the task force's recommendations is an open question with no answer yet.