- White House Director says AI isn’t to blame for job cuts
- Kevin Hassett says “There’s no sign in the data that AI is costing anybody their job right now”
- This is despite a large number of well-publicized incidents where exactly this has happened
A senior White House figure has denied that the rising presence of AI is leading to job cuts, despite a large number of examples saying just that.
Speaking to CNBC, White House National Economic Council Director Kevin Hassett said there were no negative impacts being felt on US employment by AI at the moment.
“There’s no sign in the data that AI is costing anybody their job right now,” Hassett said, “but we are studying the future of AI and what it means for the workforce, so we’ve got a big taskforce on that.
AI and job cuts
In fact, Hassett doubled down on his statement, adding that companies which adopt AI “tend to see rapid revenue growth and even employment growth, and it’s the ones that don’t do that that fall behind a little bit.”
Hassett’s comments may come as a surprise to some, given the numerous examples recently of companies confirming they are laying off human workers directly because of AI.
Most notably, Microsoft has reduced headcount in several divisions while massively increasing its AI spending through OpenAI partnerships and AI infrastructure expansion.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has repeatedly described the company’s push toward “leaner,” more AI-driven teams while cutting thousands of jobs, while recent restructuring and layoffs were linked to AI-focused efficiency and investment priorities.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told staff in early 2024 that further job cuts were needed to fund the company’s “ambitious goals” in AI, before later saying in June 2025 that it wouldn’t be doing so.
In May 2025, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also warned the US government about the risk AI poses to white-collar jobs, predicting up to half of all entry-level roles could be taken by AI, leading to unemployment of as much as 20% in the next one to five years.
GitLab also recently announced layoffs and restructuring explicitly tied to what CEO Bill Staples called the “agentic era” of AI software development. The company said software would increasingly be “built by machines, directed by people.”
However Hassett is not alone in trying to promote the use of AI in the workplace, with his views echoed by a number of other leading figures.
This includes Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who is doing his part to talk up the advantages of AI for some time, especially when it comes to trying to dispel fears over human job losses, focusing instead on the part it would play in automating routine or boring tasks, freeing up human workers for more engaging areas.
Huang said that people who believe an entire role will be replace simply due to a single part being automated, “misunderstand that the purpose of a job and the task of a job are related”.
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