OpenAI Economist Says Jobs Data Disproves AI Unemployment Fears

OpenAI Economist Says Jobs Data Disproves AI Unemployment Fears

Jobs data contradicts the common fear that artificial intelligence will put people out of work, OpenAI Chief Economist Aaron Chatterji said Tuesday (June 30).

Speaking at the European Central Bank’s ECB Forum on Central Banking, Chatterji said people often come to him with anxiety about the job market “regardless of what the data is showing.”

Current data shows that the U.S. unemployment rate is below 5% and that Europe isn’t seeing AI-induced unemployment.

Chatterji added that those facts don’t make someone feel better if they are looking for a job, especially if they are a recent graduate struggling to find a position.

For them, Chatterji suggested thinking about the skill set they want to develop and the employers they want to reach and looking at jobs data to see which occupations are growing and which are shrinking.

For example, while there were many predictions that software development jobs would shrink as AI capabilities increased, that hasn’t happened to the extent that people expected, Chatterji said.

“Why is that? People in San Francisco call it Jevons paradox. It’s just a downward sloping demand curve,” Chatterji said. “When the price of something goes down, if demand is elastic, people might buy more of it.”

“So, it’s important to separate out some of the things that are being thrown around with what’s actually happening in the data,” Chatterji said.

Chatterji said his father was an economist when personal computers began to replace mainframe computers and that the new technology complemented his father’s work and made him more productive.

“So, just because a task is exposed to AI doesn’t mean it’s going to be a substitute for that,” Chatterji said.

PYMNTS reported in September 2025 that technological leaps forward reshape the labor market profoundly — creating new jobs, retiring old ones and altering how people work — and that the big question right now is how AI will impact jobs.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in May that he was wrong about the impact artificial intelligence would have on employment and that a “jobs apocalypse” triggered by AI adoption has not come to pass.

“I’m delighted to be wrong about this, I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened,” Altman said.