Sam Altman admits AI is killing the labor-capital balance—and says nobody knows what to do about it

Addressing the current backlash, Altman noted that AI has become a widespread scapegoat for corporate downsizing and rising utility costs. “Data centers are getting blamed for electricity prices hikes. Almost every company that does layoffs is blaming AI, whether or not it really is about AI,” Altman explained, recalling his recent warning that some companies were engaging in what’s called “AI washing,” in blaming layoffs on new tech regardless if that was the reason for those layoffs in the first place. However, while some of the immediate blame might be misplaced, Altman confirmed that the underlying threat to traditional employment is grounded in reality.

He said he saw a quote online that’s been sticking in his head, around how for centuries, maybe millennia, humans have learned how to structure society to manage scarcity, and now we have to quickly learn the opposite, managing “abundance.” “So that’s, like, a real change to how capitalism has worked,” he said, noting that capitalism has also depended on at least something of a power balance between labor and capital. “But if it’s hard in many of our current jobs to outwork a GPU, then that changes.” He said it, frankly, stumps him. “If there was an easy consensus answer, we’d have done it by now, so I don’t think anyone knows what to do.”

The AI landscape has crossed a threshold into “major economic utility” over the last few months, Altman claimed, rapidly evolving from simple coding assistance to executing complex tasks across various fields of knowledge work. Altman warned that the pace of this evolution is disorienting, and very soon, AI agents will be trusted to handle multi-day and multi-week tasks, operating proactively much like a senior human employee.

This shift is already altering corporate behavior. A new generation of startups is deliberately avoiding large head counts, preferring instead to invest their capital heavily into computing power. In places like India, Altman observed entrepreneurs attempting to build “zero person” startups, relying entirely on AI prompts to write software, handle legal work, and manage customer support.

Even the C-suite won’t be immune to this transformation, Altman warned. He predicted a future where the cognitive capacity inside data centers will eclipse human capacity outside of them, potentially by late 2028, implicitly recalling his rival Anthropic’s warning that each AI cluster would have the brainpower of 50 million Nobel prize winners. Ultimately, Altman said he foresees a threshold where the leaders of major organizations—including CEOs, presidents, and top scientists—will be entirely unable to perform their duties without heavy reliance on AI supervision and assistance.

To fuel this intelligence revolution, Altman said OpenAI is pursuing massive infrastructure buildouts, including gigawatt data center campuses, with the ultimate goal of making artificial intelligence “too cheap to meter.” He said, “We want to flood the world with intelligence, we want people to just use it for everything.”

To address the physical bottlenecks of this expansion, OpenAI has partnered with North American building trades unions to expand pathways for skilled construction workers, highlighting that massive physical infrastructure is necessary to support AI’s digital growth. Altman envisions a future where intelligence is sold as a basic utility, like water or electricity, flooding the global market and fundamentally rewriting the rules of the economy.

However, achieving this era of abundance will not be easy. Altman predicted that traditional economic metrics like GDP might plummet in a “forever deflationary world,” forcing society to rethink how it measures quality of life. Spookily, Altman was echoing the viral doomsday AI essay from Citrini Research that warned of spiralling deflation and “ghost GDP,” leading to economic chaos within 18 months.

While Altman insisted, back in December, he is “not a long-term jobs doomer” and believes humanity will eventually invent new roles, he did not sugarcoat the immediate future. He warned that “the next few years are going to be a painful adjustment,” heavily marked by “very intense and uncomfortable debates” over how to reshape society. Several weeks ago, one of Altman’s AI counterparts, Sir Demis Hassabis of Google DeepMind, a Nobel prize winner himself, told Fortune Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell that AI abundance will lead to a “kind of new renaissance,” but there will be a shakeout over the next 10 years en route to it.

For this story, Fortune journalists used generative AI as a research tool. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.