In the halls of power in Washington, OpenAI’s chief, Sam Altman, warned of total job losses from AI and how national security is being rewritten. Altman positions OpenAI as not just a participant, but as the essential architect of our destiny.
Holding court at the Federal Reserve’s conference for large banks, Altman clearly stated how he believes AI will impact how people earn a living. He spoke of certain jobs not just being changed, but erased completely.
“Some areas, again, I think will be totally, totally gone,” he said, pointing at the customer support industry as an example. “That’s a category where I just say, you know what, when you call customer support, you’re speaking to AI, and that’s fine.”
He described this shift not as a distant forecast but as a present-day reality. To the Federal Reserve’s Michelle Bowman, he described an almost utopian interaction with an AI agent.
“You call one of these things and AI answers. It’s like a super-smart, capable person,” says Altman. “There’s no phone tree, there’s no transfers. It can do everything that any customer support agent at that company could do. It does not make mistakes. It’s very quick. You call once and the thing just happens.”
But Altman’s belief that AI will cause total job losses in some careers isn’t the only story being told in the tech world. Others argue that the future isn’t about what AI will do to us, but what we choose to do with it. Manoj Chaudhary, CTO of the integration firm Jitterbit, offers a dose of caution.
“AI isn’t what threatens jobs, but rather poorly planned deployment. The real danger lies in using powerful tools without purpose or human judgment,” Chaudhary warned. He sees a risk in a blind rush for technological solutions.
“Companies chasing quick efficiencies risk discarding the human insight that drives real value. As many are now realising, AI isn’t a cure-all; even the smartest systems fall short where empathy and nuance matter. Without careful, human-led oversight, the consequences of AI misuse will be hard to ignore.”
The scale of Altman’s vision for AI, however, extends far beyond call centres. The transformation, he suggests, is already knocking at the door of our healthcare system. He made the claim that his company’s own creation is already a world-class physician.
“ChatGPT today, by the way, most of the time, is like a better diagnostician than most doctors in the world,” he asserted. Yet, in a moment of candour – after championing AI as the superior doctor – he confessed he wouldn’t fully trust it with his own health.
“Yet people still go to doctors, and I am not, like, maybe I’m a dinosaur here, but I really do not want to, like, entrust my medical fate to ChatGPT with no human doctor in the loop,” he admitted.
This tightrope walk between promotion and precaution is happening on a new political stage. Under the Trump administration, the conversation in Washington around AI has shifted from the caution and regulation sought under President Biden to minimise impacts like job losses, to an unrelenting focus on acceleration to outpace China.
It is in this high-stakes environment that Altman shared his deepest fears. He spoke of sleepless nights, troubled by the thought of a hostile nation using AI as a weapon to cripple the US financial system.
Altman also marvelled at the power of voice cloning technology but warned of how it could be used for unstoppable fraud, especially since “there are still some financial institutions that will accept voiceprints for authentication.”
The OpenAI chief’s visit, his first major congressional testimony since he exploded onto the global stage in 2023, is part of a clear strategy as the firm plans to open an OpenAI office in Washington next year.
Altman came to Washington with two messages that seem to pull in opposite directions. The first is that his technology will bring about an age of incredible progress. However, the second is that AI holds the potential for immense destruction—causing total job losses and increasing national security threats.
The ultimate goal, it seems, is to convince the world that only he and OpenAI can safely navigate the path between the two.
(Image credit: World Economic Forum / Benedikt von Loebell under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 license. Image has been cropped.)
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