Fear of AI is pushing office workers to rethink their careers

Careers no longer feel secure

At the start of the year, AI researcher Mrinank Sharma left Anthropic. His resignation statement, posted on X, drew 15.3 million views. Sharma warned that the technology he had helped create was putting the world at risk, and decided to pursue a degree in poetry.

After his departure, workers outside Silicon Valley began voicing similar concerns. People in technology, public relations and consulting say AI is rapidly changing the nature and stability of their work. They worry about its effects on their ability to think independently, the climate, the value of their services to clients and their job security. Some are leaving their professions altogether.

Vanessa Shea, 30, spent nearly a decade in public relations before deciding to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature. She was dissatisfied with an industry that prioritised quantity over quality, relied on AI instead of critical thinking, and favoured short-term results over long-term strategy. Shea does not know where her new path will lead, but she decided to follow her own advice and do what she wants.

She and her former colleagues feared that AI would eventually displace them. Some tasks had already been automated, such as emailing journalists. Shea expected hard work to help her advance, earn respect and receive decent pay. But, she says, the new technology showed that none of those expectations was guaranteed.

Shea believes the familiar formula of “a degree, an office job, a promotion” is becoming less reliable, and that AI is accelerating the shift. An anonymous software engineer at a large technology company shares that concern: he and his colleagues expect their roles to disappear soon as AI automates programming. They had planned to work as engineers for another ten or twenty years, but he is now considering leaving the industry.

When the work itself changes

Hannah Horvath, 29, spent most of her twenties in content marketing and editing. Earlier this year, she left her job as an editor at personal finance service Bankrate. She now does freelance writing and social media marketing, works as a financial adviser and writes a Substack newsletter.

Even before AI appeared, Horvath felt that her day-to-day tasks were increasingly disconnected from the job she had been hired to do, and that they were losing meaning. After several rounds of layoffs at the company, she stopped seeing a nine-to-five job as a guarantee of stability. Her attitude toward work worsened further when her employer required staff to use AI.

Horvath stresses that AI can change a person’s relationship with work without replacing their job. She says many employees have shifted from editing and writing to acting as project managers. In a LinkedIn post, she wrote that AI had already changed workers’ psychological well-being: people fear for their jobs and are losing their sense of purpose. With several sources of income, Horvath now feels more financially secure and is less worried about being replaced by AI.

Other professionals are also making radical career changes, moving, for example, from technology into law enforcement or from advertising into acting.

Chris, who asked not to be identified by his real name because he feared possible consequences, left his software engineering job last year and joined the police force in a large city on the US East Coast. He says programming had stopped being enjoyable because AI had taken a substantial part of the intellectual challenge out of the work. He was also afraid of losing his job.

Chris spent more than ten years in office jobs. He believes corporate work offers no guarantee of employment: an employee can end up being just a replaceable resource. Chris is glad he left before his employer began actively introducing AI to his team. He now enjoys working directly with the local community and feels happier than he did as an engineer.

Kara, who also uses a pseudonym, left her job as an advertising producer to focus on acting. She works part-time as a barista and says she felt relieved after leaving.

Kara had grown increasingly tired of her job, in part because she was required to use AI despite concerns about whether its use was legal and how it affected creativity. Her team was encouraged to use Runway tools to create video and images, as well as the ElevenLabs voice generator. As a producer, Kara was responsible for legal approvals at a time when using AI to create video and audio depicting a person or imitating their voice remained a legal grey area.

Kara says her employer both required the use of generative AI and warned about the legal risks. That caused constant stress. She also opposed AI-generated works based on artists’ work. Those objections, along with her responsibility for legal issues, made the job unbearable. Kara calls her move to part-time barista work a way to support herself and says she is happy with the decision.

Warnings from executives add to the anxiety

AI company leaders have warned for years about major upheaval in the labour market. In May 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI would displace half of entry-level office workers by the end of the decade. That scale of layoffs has not happened yet.

This year, Amodei repeated his prediction in an essay on his personal website. He wrote that AI is getting better at a broad range of tasks requiring human intelligence and will also be able to do new kinds of work that typically emerge after older tasks are automated. Amodei described AI as a universal substitute for human labour.

Brendan Moore, a professor of economics at the University of Notre Dame who has studied workers’ views of AI and the risk of job loss, says anxiety is fuelled both by executives’ statements and by news of layoffs. Large technology and telecommunications companies sometimes attribute job cuts to AI adoption, although some would probably have cut their workforces even without the technology.

Workers support the economy, so large-scale changes in career plans can affect wages, prices and economic growth. During the “Great Resignation,” when employees quit en masse during the COVID-19 pandemic, wages and consumer inflation rose. If fear of AI leads to mass departures, similar economic consequences are possible. Even without mass layoffs, anxiety about job loss can affect the economy, Moore notes.

In recent months, AI company leaders have softened their bleak predictions, but workers’ negative views have already caught lawmakers’ attention. Earlier this year, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders proposed a temporary ban on building new federal data centers for AI until protections are put in place for workers at risk of losing their jobs. In an article for Fox News, he wrote that developers want to replace workers, not just individual tasks, and called AI a nightmare for the working class.

Some technology executives, by contrast, have criticised the industry for failing to offer a convincing positive vision of the future. In an August essay, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said he was surprised that many AI developers focused their conversations on bleak scenarios. He also questioned the ambition to build a future in which AI deprives most people of work and purpose.

Dataist's take: Fear of AI is already changing workers’ decisions, even though the data cited here do not confirm mass displacement. That gap matters: industry leaders’ predictions influence how employees behave before the changes they promise become reality. Horvath, Chris and Kara also show that people respond in different ways, from seeking several sources of income to leaving their professions altogether.