Former presidential candidate Andrew Yang has issued a desperate warning that artificial intelligence may cause a “jobpocalypse” that would leave white-collar workers without jobs within the next 18 months.
Yang, who competed in the 2020 Democratic primary, has become the latest public figure to question how the current AI boom may impact the employment of millions of Americans.
“I believe that millions of white-collar workers are going to lose their jobs in the next 12 to 18 months due to AI,” Yang said in a video shared to Instagram Saturday.
“AI is now able to do the work of a very, very smart human in minutes or even seconds. This is going to displace marketers, coders, designers, lawyers, accountants, call center workers — you name it,” he continued.
Yang warned that, as a result, there would be an extreme “winner-take-all” economy, in which only the wealthiest people, or the top 20 percent, would be able to thrive.
“When people lose their jobs, it affects dry cleaners, dog walkers, hair stylists, restaurants — all local businesses that see fewer people who are able to spend,” he said.
As a result, personal bankruptcies will “surge,” and college graduates will have an even more difficult time finding entry-level jobs, Yang added.
“People are going to be very, very angry by the fact that this path to middle-class status and social mobility is going to be broken,” he said.
Yang noted that a universal basic income — which was the centerpiece of his presidential platform — would be necessary. He has long advocated for the idea, which would involve all citizens receiving a set amount of money each month, independent of their work status.
Concluding the video, he warned, “The AI jobpocolypse is real, and it’s underway right now.”
Yang’s deterrent follows similar warnings from Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, the maker of the chatbot Claude.
Amodei told Axios in May 2025 that AI could wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within five years.
An MIT study published in November that used a simulation tool called the Iceberg Index seems to back his claim. The study found that AI could technically already replace 11.7 percent of the U.S. labor market — accounting for roughly $1.2 trillion in wages across finance, health care and professional services.
The prospect of AI taking white-collar jobs was also raised in “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis,” a report published Sunday by Citrini Research. The article, which isn’t a prediction of a hypothetical scenario, offers an unsettling forecast about the looming threat of AI to white-collar work.
The doomsday report, which hypothesized that AI’s boom will lead to mass white-collar layoffs and a stock market collapse, left Wall Street shaken earlier this week amid falling stock prices in major tech and financial firms.
Part of Citrini’s scenario revolves around AI causing a negative feedback loop, in which companies invest more in AI and lay off more workers. With such a case, those laid-off workers would not be spending as much, causing companies to adopt even more AI to try and make a profit — and then the cycle repeats itself.
However, some experts have called the thesis far-fetched.
Pierre Yared, the acting chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, called it an “interesting piece of science fiction.”
“The Citrini report is an interesting piece of science fiction — and I like science fiction,” Yared told Bloomberg. “But I think that if you really look at it, and think long and hard about it, it violates some of the basic accounting in economics.”
Jim Reid, Deutsche Bank’s global head of macro research and thematic strategy, said that Citrini’s thesis lacks “hard evidence” to back it up.
“The argument leans heavily on narrative and emotion rather than hard evidence,” Reid said. “That doesn’t mean it will ultimately be wrong, but in both cases the vibes to substance ratio is undeniably high. I’ll stop there, before anyone accuses my own research of the same thing.”
