For the mild scenario, Anthropic suggests workforce training grants and baby investment accounts. For the middling one, expanded unemployment insurance. For the catastrophic one, it admits it isn't sure, but floats universal basic income, sovereign wealth funds, and taxing AI companies by the token. Which is a bit like a car manufacturer publishing a pamphlet on what to do if cars turn out to be too dangerous to drive, and the final chapter just says "we're still working on it."

The company has pledged $350 million toward researching these questions. It has not mentioned slowing down.

The genuinely interesting detail, which Gizmodo quite rightly flagged, is that nobody asked whether Claude helped write the plan for dealing with Claude-caused unemployment. Anthropic didn't respond. Probably fine.

The timing is pointed. Bloomberg reported this week that Apple is in the late stages of developing camera-equipped AirPods for exactly the same purpose: navigation, contextual reminders, ambient awareness. The whole package.

The researchers' version makes some sensible compromises to keep the battery alive. Low-resolution, black-and-white cameras. Less data, less drain, and theoretically fewer privacy nightmares when someone inevitably reverse-engineers the thing. Response times are apparently comparable to the Ray-Bans, which is faint praise, but not nothing.

The harder problem is one no spec sheet fixes: AI vision on wearables is still, in practice, a bit rubbish. Slow, wrong, cloud-dependent, and liable to fail the moment your 4G signal gets politely strangled by a car park. Stuffing the cameras somewhere smaller and less visible doesn't change that. It just makes the disappointment more intimate.

The people actually writing the code have a different read on it.

Developers talking to 404 Media describe a slow, creeping de-skilling: the kind that happens when you stop doing the hard thing yourself and realise, six months later, that you can't anymore. One engineer forgot how to implement a basic API he'd used for years. Another described losing track of what his own codebase actually does. A third put it plainly: "It's making me dumber for sure. It's like when we got cellphones and stopped remembering phone numbers, but it's grown to me mentally outsourcing 'thinking' in general."

None of this is surprising, exactly. It's what happens when you mandate a tool regardless of whether it fits the work. The executives measuring AI adoption aren't the ones untangling the rat's nest it leaves behind.

What's quietly alarming is the compulsion layer. Performance reviews tied to AI usage. Developers using it performatively because the alternative is a bad appraisal. The output doesn't have to be good. It just has to exist.

The problem is that this prediction has been running on a loop since early 2025. Dario Amodei said it. Jim Farley said it. Elon Musk said it in Davos, which is arguably the natural habitat for this kind of thing. The AI apocalypse has been 18 months away for about 18 months now.

The actual numbers are less cinematic. A study on software developers found AI made their tasks take 20% longer. Lawyers and accountants are experimenting with document review tools and seeing marginal gains. Profit margin improvements from AI are almost entirely confined to Big Tech. The broader economy has barely noticed.

Suleyman's company quietly laid off 15,000 people last year while not mentioning AI as a reason, which is its own kind of answer.

The prediction may eventually be right. But there is something telling about the people most loudly announcing the end of professional work being, to a man, the ones selling the thing that supposedly ends it.

Which is one way to handle it.

Caulfield spent roughly three of her eleven minutes praising AI and drawing comparisons to how people once worried about email and mobile phones, as one does. The crowd of arts, humanities, and media graduates was perhaps not the most receptive audience for this particular TED talk. Graduate Houda Eletr called it "the most embarrassing, unskippable, tone-deaf, ad-like commencement" she could imagine. Unskippable is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and good on her for it.

The clip spread fast online, mostly because there's something genuinely clarifying about watching a room of young creative workers vote with their lungs. The people being told AI is good for them happen to be the people whose jobs it's replacing first. They understood the subtext. They just weren't polite about it.

Altman, to be clear, denies that. But it is the backdrop.

The feature is opt-in, in the sense that the data-sharing toggle is auto-enabled and you have to find it yourself to turn it off. OpenAI says your full account numbers won't be visible and the chatbot can't move money. It can only see your balances, transactions, investments, and liabilities. So: everything except the PIN.

There's a partnership with Intuit tucked in here too, for tax help, which is a genuinely useful thing. And 200 million people apparently already ask ChatGPT for budgeting advice monthly, which is either a ringing endorsement or a small civilisational warning sign, depending on your mood.

The pitch is personalisation. The risk is that personalisation requires the data to exist somewhere, and data that exists somewhere can leak.

The dean of the faculty cited "the perception that cheating on in-class exams has become widespread," and named generative AI specifically. Worth noting: it's a perception, not a confirmed explosion of documented cases. But perception moves institutions, especially old ones that have spent 133 years assuming the best of their students. Once the assumption cracks, you don't just patch it. You hire a proctor.

Which brings us to the joke the Verge couldn't resist, and fair enough: at least AI has created one job. The student chaperone is back, clipboard in hand, patrolling the rows like a supply teacher who's heard everything.

There's something genuinely sad in here if you look for it. The honour code wasn't naive, it was a bet on human character. Princeton ran that bet for longer than most countries have had the telephone. It lost it to a chatbot.

This is, depending on your perspective, entirely rational or a betrayal of every colleague who's ever offered you a cup of tea. The developer, Pressberg, is clear-eyed about the situation. He doesn't have close relationships with the people who'll likely be displaced. He reckons he's not the only one doing this. And his summary of the available options is, genuinely, hard to argue with: you can ride the horse, or get trampled by it, but you can't just watch the race.

Which is a sensible framing, and also exactly the kind of sensible framing that makes something slightly terrible feel inevitable.

The uncomfortable part isn't that one developer in Florida made a pragmatic call. It's that this is apparently a widespread enough experience that Business Insider ran the story with "I think" in the headline, suggesting the builders often don't even know for certain. They're just guessing, building, and hoping the horse isn't coming for them next.