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A New Phase of the AI-Jobs Panic
Silicon Valley is making a show of helping prepare the country for AI layoffs. Is it philanthropy, or just brilliant marketing?
In late March, I started receiving daily texts from the federal government about artificial intelligence.
“🇺🇸 AI is changing how we work and live,” one message read. “You might feel curious, skeptical, or unsure—that’s normal.”
I had enrolled in an AI-literacy course launched by the Labor Department, designed to help American workers navigate the newly minted "ChatGPT economy." Created in partnership with a tech start-up and delivered entirely via SMS, the weeklong program promised to equip citizens with “foundational AI skills.”
The actual texts, however, were less than reassuring. One message enthusiastically encouraged me to ask a chatbot for "side hustle ideas." Another suggested I sharpen my AI intuition by doodling: “Grab a friend and see whose drawing of a hippo AI can recognize … and whose it mistakes for a lumpy potato. 🥔.”
When it comes to the automated threat hanging over the American workforce, the country has long acted like a deer in headlights. For all the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding looming layoffs, meaningful preparation has lagged. Earlier this year, after interviewing a roster of the nation’s top business and political minds, my colleague Josh Tyrangiel concluded that no one actually has a plan.
Government interventions have been underwhelming. Text-message drawing games are a drop in the bucket if a mass unemployment crisis is truly on the horizon. While the Trump administration pledged last year to expand tech-focused apprenticeship programs, progress has been middling at best.
Meanwhile, Silicon Valley continues to sprint ahead. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently issued a stark warning, noting that “AI isn’t a substitute for specific human jobs but rather a general labor substitute for humans.”
Yet, over the past several weeks, a shift has occurred. Politicians and tech executives have begun making a highly visible show of preparing the country for an era of AI-driven layoffs. But while these new initiatives sound promising, a closer look reveals they neatly align with the self-interests of Big Tech.
The Sovereign Wealth Solution?
Consider the flashy new proposal for state ownership of artificial intelligence. Last month, Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act, which would hand the federal government a 50 percent equity stake in major AI powerhouses, including OpenAI and Anthropic. An appointed public commission would hold voting shares to help “stop bad decisions that will reap massive job loss,” Sanders announced on a press call.
While a trillion-dollar stock grab is on-brand for Sanders, the real surprise is who is nodding along.
Following the announcement, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly requested a meeting with Sanders. While Altman doesn't endorse the senator's exact roadmap, he explicitly supports the concept of public ownership. It’s a drum Altman has been beating for a while; in April, OpenAI endorsed a "public wealth fund" to ensure every citizen has “a stake in AI-driven economic growth.” More recently, the Financial Times reported that Altman has floated a plan to the Trump administration offering a 5 percent public stake in OpenAI and its competitors.
But relying on a notoriously dysfunctional Congress to smoothly manage tech stocks and redistribute the dividends to the public feels like wishful thinking. Furthermore, it won't save a collapsing job market. Sanders’s aggressive wealth fund aims to start by paying roughly $1,000 annually to each American—a helpful sum, but hardly a replacement for a career.
Private tech empires don't surrender equity out of altruism. Public ownership could dull the political appetite for stricter, more onerous regulations. Perhaps that explains why Gwynne Shotwell, president of SpaceX (home to Elon Musk’s xAI), announced that she and her husband would be donating stock directly to the Trump Accounts—the newly launched children's savings initiative. Anthropic, too, has expressed eager interest in funding research into “AI sovereign wealth funds” to counteract extreme unemployment.
Funding the Transition
Silicon Valley is also opening its wallet for traditional policy initiatives:
OpenAI Foundation: In May, OpenAI’s nonprofit arm (which owns roughly a quarter of the commercial company) pledged $250 million in grants and partnerships to study the economic transition.
Anthropic: Last month, the company committed $350 million toward evaluating public policy responses, focusing heavily on reforming unemployment insurance and tracking AI's real-time impact on the labor market.
Economists remain deeply divided on how severe the damage will be. Widespread AI layoffs have not yet manifested, and many experts doubt a total job apocalypse is inevitable. However, even moderate, rapid displacement could severely shock the American economy.
Enter "Raise Us"
To bridge the data gap, a powerhouse bipartisan nonprofit called Raise Us launched last month. Led by Gina Raimondo (Joe Biden’s former Commerce Secretary) and Eric Holcomb (the former Republican Governor of Indiana), the organization has already raised over $500 million from philanthropies—like the Rockefeller Foundation, Melinda French Gates’s Pivotal, and Emerson Collective—alongside direct cash injections from Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, and OpenAI.
THE "RAISE US" COALITION
┌──────────────────────────────┐ ┌──────────────────────────────┐
│ POLITICAL LEADERS │ │ SILICON VALLEY │
│ Gina Raimondo & Eric Holcomb │ │ Anthropic, OpenAI, Microsoft │
└──────────────┬───────────────┘ └──────────────┬───────────────┘
│ │
└────────────────┬────────────────┘
▼
State-Level Policy Experiments
(Wage Insurance, Apprenticeships)
Raimondo told me the goal is to use red and blue states—including Utah, Connecticut, Arkansas, and Maryland—as testing grounds for targeted federal policies.
One primary focus is wage insurance. If an automated worker is forced to take a lower-paying job elsewhere, wage insurance would temporarily subsidize the income gap. David Autor, an MIT economist and unpaid adviser to Raise Us, notes that while the policy shows promise, it has "never been done at any significant scale in the United States." The group also plans to pilot modern apprenticeship programs and AI-driven career navigation tools.
The Ultimate Tech Playbook
While generating empirical data is incredibly valuable, Big Tech’s heavy involvement in Raise Us doubles as a brilliant public relations strategy.
Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft, compared the Raise Us coalition to the public-private partnerships forged during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is a compelling analogy, but deeply flawed. Imagine if the pharmaceutical giants engineering the vaccines during Operation Warp Speed were simultaneously creating more dangerous viruses in the back room. Tech companies are racing to automate human labor out of existence while positioning themselves as the heroes arriving to handle the fallout.
Managing this labor transition is pure self-preservation. A massive societal backlash is brewing. If mass layoffs arrive, the tech industry's reputation will crater, inviting devastating antitrust or regulatory crackdowns from Washington.
But this isn't just about good optics; it's about market capture.
Many of these tech-supported safety nets are designed to deepen our dependence on their software. In Maryland, Raise Us is funding a startup accelerator that gives displaced workers financial assistance—conditioned on using AI tools to build their new businesses.
Even more telling is Anthropic’s new Claude Corps initiative. Nearly half of its $350 million commitment will fund a national fellowship paying early-career workers $85,000 a year to embed its AI assistant, Claude, into at least 400 nonprofits.
The tech industry's proposed solution to AI taking entry-level jobs? Pay young people to evangelize the very software that replaced them.