Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned in a Wall Street Journal interview that software is going to become “essentially free” in the future, with the upfront cost of building software plummeting so fast that companies no longer need millions of users to justify building it. Amodei said the time and financial cost required to build functional software is shrinking from months and millions of dollars to hours and pennies, meaning “there are whole jobs, whole careers that we've built for decades that may not be present.” The warning escalates Amodei's prediction from a year ago, when he cautioned that AI could trigger a serious employment crisis, especially for entry-level white collar work in finance, consulting, and tech, with the industry having since seen thousands of AI-linked job cuts including Meta's planned 8,000-person layoff this Wednesday.
