When artificial intelligence researcher Mrinank Sharma left his job at Anthropic earlier this year, the news spread across the Internet. In his resignation letter, published on X and viewed 15.3 million times, Sharma warned of a world “in peril” because of the technology he helped build.
“It is clear to me that the time has come to move on,” he wrote. His next step: a poetry degree.
In the months since Sharma resigned, AI industry defectors and workers outside of Silicon Valley have echoed his sentiments.
Preparing for anticipated disruption from the AI industry, white-collar workers are voluntarily abandoning established careers to pursue occupations they believe are safer or more consistent with their values. Workers across industries – from technology to public relations to consulting – say AI has changed the substance and stability of their jobs overnight. They fear that AI will jeopardize their cognitive abilities, contribute to climate change, compromise customer value and compromise security. Some, like Sharma, left their field entirely to pursue very different careers.
So far, economic data shows that AI has not wreaked havoc on the workforce. This has created about a million jobs in the United States, compared to 200,000 layoffs attributed to AI, according to The Economist. But as AI leaders continue to warn of disruption, 71% of Americans believe the technology will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years, according to the Pew Research Center. However, as workers fear for the future, they make important decisions about the present.
Change on the ground
Some white-collar workers have begun to look beyond the dreams they were sold as AI reshapes jobs.
After spending nearly a decade in public relations, Vanessa Hsia, 30, decided to pursue a master’s degree in comparative literature.
“I felt very exhausted and concerned about the direction of the industry: prioritizing quantity over quality, relying on AI over critical thinking, prioritizing short-term wins over long-term strategy,” Hsia said on LinkedIn. “I have no idea where this path will lead, but I take my own advice: the world is on fire, you might as well do what you want.”
Hsia and her former PR colleagues feared that AI would eventually replace them, she said, noting that specific tasks such as pitching reporters via email were already automated.
“I was sold the dream that if I work really hard in my career, I will move up the ladder, that I will be respected in my field and that I will receive a fair salary,” she said. “But then there’s this technology that exacerbates the fact that actually, no, it’s not guaranteed.”
The secure, orderly way of life defined by a bachelor’s degree, an office job, and a career is in its death throes, accelerated by the encroaching tidal wave of AI, says Hsia. This is an opinion shared by other white-collar workers.
“The career I had for 10 years is basically gone,” said a software engineer at a large tech company, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation. The engineer and his peers believe their roles will soon cease to exist as AI automates coding. “We all thought we would be software engineers for another decade or two,” he said, adding that he considered leaving the industry. “Now it’s completely changed.”
For some workers, AI has accelerated the feelings of instability and worthlessness they already experienced during their careers. Hanna Horvath spent most of her 20s as a content marketer and copywriter. But earlier this year, the 29-year-old left her job as an editor at personal finance platform Bankrate to freelance in writing and social media marketing, serve as a financial planner and publish a Substack newsletter.
Even before the introduction of AI, Horvath felt like her day job had strayed from what she was hired to do, becoming “meaningless.” And after witnessing several layoffs at her company, she no longer felt assured by the promised stability of a nine-to-five job.
Once her company mandated the use of AI, Horvath felt even worse. “AI doesn’t need to replace your job to fundamentally change your relationship to your job,” she said. “A lot of us were just becoming project managers instead of actually editing or writing content.”
On LinkedIn, Horvath wrote that while the broader conversation about AI has focused on displacing jobs, the technology “has already changed the psychology of workers,” referring to people’s fears and loss of meaning. Now, with varied sources of income, Horvath said she feels more financially secure and less vulnerable to AI replacement.
Some white-collar workers make complete career moves: from technology to law enforcement to advertising to acting.
Chris, who asked to use a pseudonym for fear of retaliation, left his job as a software engineer to join the police department of a large East Coast city last year. AI had taken “a lot of the thinking” and fun out of coding, and he feared being displaced, he said.
“There’s no job security in corporations anymore,” said Chris, who spent more than a decade working in white-collar work. “You are replaceable, you are an asset.”
Chris considers himself lucky to have left software engineering when his employer began promoting AI on his team. Today, as a police officer, “there’s a satisfaction that I never had in engineering…In many ways, I’m happier,” he said, referring to working directly with his community.
Similarly, Kara, who asked to use a pseudonym to speak candidly about her former career, said that quitting her job as an advertising producer to focus on her role as a moonlighting barista made her “feel spiritually lighter.”
Kara experienced increasing burnout, which she attributes largely to being asked to use AI despite her concerns about legality and creative use. She said her team is encouraged to use AI-powered production tools, such as Runway, which generates AI videos and images, and ElevenLabs, an AI voice generator, to complement their creative work. As a producer, she was tasked with handling legal paperwork at a time when AI-generated video and audio based on the image of a human being is still a gray area.
Her employer “forced” the team to incorporate generative AI, then “in the same conversation, warned of legal dangers,” she said. The result was constant stress.
Kara also worries about AI generating art after training on the work of human artists. Between her creative opposition and the stress of overseeing the legal use of AI, the task “became untenable,” she said. She’s transitioning into what she calls her “survival job” as a barista “with great happiness,” she added.
Fueling job-related fears
For years, AI architects have insisted that their technology poses immense economic threats. In May 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that AI would displace half of all entry-level white-collar jobs by the end of the decade. This carnage has not yet materialized.
This year, Amodei doubled down on its position in a trial on its website.
“AI increasingly matches the general cognitive profile of humans, which means it will also be effective for new jobs that would normally be created in response to the automation of old ones,” reads his essay, which calls AI “a general labor substitute for humans.”
Workers’ fears likely stem from warnings from company executives and the layoffs they’re seeing, even if the data doesn’t show AI leads to job losses, said Brendan Moore, an economics professor at the University of Notre Dame who has studied workers’ sentiment toward AI and job insecurity.
“Between the proclamations from tech CEOs that there are going to be massive layoffs, and many big tech and telecom companies citing AI as the reason for their layoffs… people are saying, ‘Oh, it’s due to AI,’” Moore said, adding that some companies probably would have cut their workforces anyway.
Workers continue to drive the economy, so if large numbers of them change course, wages, prices and economic growth could be affected, Moore said. After the “Great Resignation,” when workers quit en masse during the Covid-19 pandemic, wages and consumer inflation rose. If fear of AI causes mass resignations, similar economic disruptions could materialize.
“Just the fear of job loss, even if a massive job loss never happens, can affect the economy,” Moore said.
Even though AI executives have walked back their gloomy economic forecasts in recent months, it may be too late to reverse the negative worker sentiment that has caught the attention of lawmakers.
Earlier this year, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders introduced a bill to place a federal moratorium on the construction of new AI data centers until safeguards are in place for workers facing job loss. AI leaders “don’t just want to replace specific jobs. They want to replace workers,” he wrote in an op-ed for Fox News, calling AI a “nightmare” for the working class.
At the same time, some tech executives are decrying their industry’s failure to articulate a positive vision for the future.
“It’s surprising that the rhetoric from many AI developers is so dire,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in an August essay. “I don’t understand why anyone who believes that AI will eliminate most jobs and a large part of humanity would rush to build that future.”
For workers, the problem is much simpler: AI is now destabilizing their working lives – so they are taking matters into their own hands.
“Uncertainty makes people anxious,” said Horvath, the financial planner. But “you can’t have nihilism, because in the end it only hurts you.”
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