Job losses spurred by the AI boom are growing, and a group of economists is now sounding the alarm that it’s going to get worse.
A new group called We Must Act Now released <a href="https://www.wemustactnow.ai/" rel="nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>an open letter on Monday, warning about “AI’s transformation of the economy.” The open letter is signed by more than 200 economists, and signees currently include sixteen Nobel Laureates, Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, and the chief economists of both OpenAI and Anthropic.
The open letter urges tech leaders and policymakers to take urgent action and address the impacts AI will have on the economy now and in the future.
“AI may become radically more powerful over the next 10 years,” reads the first bullet point of the open letter.
“This could drive an unprecedented transformation of our economy, larger than the Industrial Revolution, but unfolding over a vastly shorter time frame,” the open letter continues. “It could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement, as well as opportunities such as major gains in living standards.”
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We Must Act Now’s statement concludes with a call to action for leaders of both government bodies and the tech industry.
“Economists, policymakers and technology leaders must act now to understand the economics of transformative AI and to build the incentives, guardrails, and institutions needed to steer AI in a direction that complements humans and benefits society,” reads the letter.
A report released at the end of last year found that there were 50,000 jobs lost due to AI in 2025, and this year, Amazon, Atlassian, Block, Fiverr, Meta, Pinterest, and Snap have all announced layoffs related to AI. As the technology develops, AI-related job cuts are likely to accelerate, too. A survey from May 2026 found that 99 percent of executives among the 12,000 respondents said that they expected AI “to lead to at least some headcount reduction in the next two years.”
Some politicians are already working on the problem. California Governor Gavin Newsom took actionshortly after Meta laid off 8,000 employees, citing its AI push. Last month, Newsom shared that the state will be tracking AI job losses and revealed California’s AI-Unemployment Tracker.
However, the economists who signed on to the We Must Act Now letter would clearly like to see more.
“AI capabilities are advancing far faster than our understanding of the economic implications,” said economist Erik Brynjolfsson, who organized the group alongside economists Ajay Agrawal, Tom Cunningham, and Anton Korinek. “In that gap lie the greatest opportunities of our era. We must act now to guide AI to complement humans rather than simply imitate them — and to generate prosperity for the many, not just the few.”
