Elon Musk had earlier said that work would be optional once sufficiently strong AI had been developed, and now Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei seems to be echoing similar sentiments.
Amodei, whose company recently launched the advanced Claude Opus 4.5 model, has shared his vision of how powerful AI systems could fundamentally reshape society’s relationship with work. Drawing on economic theory from nearly a century ago, the Anthropic chief suggests we may be approaching an inflection point where employment transitions from being primarily about survival to something more centered on personal fulfillment and meaning.
“Over the long run, the structure of a society that has built powerful AI is just going to have to be different,” Amodei said. He invoked the work of economist John Maynard Keynes, who in his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” coined the concept of technological unemployment. “He invented this idea of technological unemployment. He suggested that maybe his grandchildren would only have to work 15 or 20 hours a week. That’s a different way of structuring the society.”
Amodei acknowledged that the transition wouldn’t be uniform across all segments of society. “Some people will always want to work as hard as possible. There’ll always be segments of society who want to do that,” he noted. But the key question, he suggested, is whether we can create conditions where this becomes a choice rather than a necessity.
“Can we have a world where work doesn’t, for many people, need to have the centrality that it does, that people find their locus of meaning elsewhere or work is about different things. It’s more about fulfillment than it is about economic survival,” Amodei said. “There’s so many possibilities here.”
Rather than advocating for top-down social engineering, Amodei expressed faith in society’s adaptive capacity. “I think society is flexible. I’m not suggesting anything top down. I think society needs to restructure itself. We all need to figure out how to operate in the post-AGI,” he said, referring to artificial general intelligence.
The remarks position Amodei alongside a growing chorus of tech leaders contemplating AI’s societal implications. Musk has previously stated that AI and robotics would make work “optional,” suggesting universal high income might replace traditional employment. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has similarly discussed the need for new economic models, including his investment in universal basic income experiments. Meanwhile, recent developments in AI capabilities have accelerated discussions about automation’s scope and pace. As companies like Google, Microsoft, and startups across Silicon Valley race to develop increasingly capable AI systems, the question is shifting from whether AI will transform work to how quickly that transformation will arrive and what structures society will need to adapt. Keynes’s prediction of a 15-hour workweek may have missed the mark for his actual grandchildren, but with AI progress accelerating, today’s tech leaders believe his vision might finally materialize for the next generation.