Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO who spent the better part of a year warning that entry-level white-collar work was about to be vaporized, beamed into a Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference in Sydney on Tuesday to say he is “delighted to be wrong about this.” The venue matters. So does the timing.

Speaking with CBA chief executive Matt Comyn, Altman conceded OpenAI had been “roughly right” on the technology and “pretty wrong” on the social and economic implications. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” he told the room, as reported by Insurance Journal’s Scott Murdoch. He doesn’t think, he added, that we’re going to have the kind of “jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about.”

Some of those companies are his.

Fortune’s Sasha Rogelberg read the moment as a coordinated softening, with Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who previously claimed AI could eliminate half of white-collar jobs, now recasting automation as a productivity multiplier rather than a layoff event. Both firms are reportedly preparing IPOs valued near $1 trillion apiece. Trillion-dollar roadshows tend to dislike doomer slide decks.

The counter-evidence is sitting in plain sight. Tech layoffs have already passed 115,000 through May 2026, against roughly 124,000 logged across all of 2025, per Fortune, with Meta, Amazon, and Snap explicitly citing AI as a driver. Cisco alone cut around 4,000 jobs this month, Euronews reports, and a Gartner finding has 80% of executives saying they’ve eliminated staff to invest in AI. Yale’s Budget Lab, by Fortune’s account, finds no significant shift in occupational mix since ChatGPT launched in 2022, which is its own kind of indictment: the headcount is going down without the work being meaningfully reorganized.

The narrative management here is older than the technology. Andrew Carnegie spent the 1890s lecturing on the gospel of wealth while Homestead was being broken by Pinkertons. The prophecy gets revised on a banker’s stage ahead of the roadshow. The workers already laid off don’t get unrevised.

Sources