AI's Workplace Revolution Is Here – And Anxiety Is Rising With It
A new Guardian series explores how artificial intelligence is reshaping jobs, expectations, and worker power across industries. Throughout 2026, The Guardian will publish a series of stories about how artificial intelligence is affecting modern labor under the title Reworked: A series about what's at stake as AI disrupts our jobs.
The Changing Vibe in Tech
Artificial intelligence, particularly the increasing automation of coding, has transformed the tech industry's attitude from one of relentless optimism and quirky perks like office ball pits to a default of grinding and austerity. As the magic dust of artificial intelligence has settled in San Francisco over the last year, the vibe among tech workers has shifted dramatically.
The excitement about a new epoch in tech – and all the money that comes with it – is now tempered with anxieties about the industry and the economy. Some workers are going all-in on AI while simultaneously questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. Others are effectively training machines to perform their jobs better than they can. Many of the same workers racing to build the future are now wondering if the future they're building has a place for them in it.
Executive Coaching Reflects New Priorities
The work of Mike Robbins, an executive coach in Silicon Valley who has worked with companies like Google, Salesforce, and Airbnb, illustrates this profound change. Robbins used to be asked to speak to companies and their leaders about topics like employee burnout, wellbeing, and belonging – top priorities during and shortly after the pandemic years.
"Quite frankly, we've stopped talking about all that," he says. Now, company leaders want advice on topics like change, disruption, and uncertainty in the workplace.
Rather than serving as a model of how we should all work, the tech industry may be a premonition for the anxiety and attempts to compensate that are coming for all of us. The change underway in San Francisco serves as an early alarm to other industries – including journalism – as AI encroaches on all types of work.
The Productivity Paradox
Automating work rarely opens time for leisure. Instead, it increases expectations of productivity. Sometimes those goals rise to unattainable levels if an employer believes the technology is more powerful than it really is. Bosses' unrealistic expectations will be the subject of a story coming later this week in the series.
Stay tuned for more excellent pieces as Reworked launches:
- An essay about the bunk promise of the four-day work week by longtime Guardian columnist Robert Reich
- On-the-ground tales from UK workers who have been training their own robotic replacements
- A powerful essay by the series' editor, Samantha Oltman, about worker power in the age of artificial intelligence
AI Industry Faces Dual Challenges
The high-velocity artificial intelligence sector hit two significant speedbumps last week. Each is quite different from the other, but both seem likely to be solved the same way.
The first snag involves a memory chip shortage. Experts predicted in September 2025 that data centers' rising demand for computer memory would make your next smartphone more expensive. That prophecy has come to pass. The three most prominent memory chip producers – Samsung and SK Hynix of South Korea and Micron of Idaho, USA – have declared code red. They cannot meet demand, which is growing because of the rapid rollout of AI infrastructure across the world.
The price of consumer electronics is already increasing as a result, since computer memory chips are foundational to nearly every type of advanced device. Sony may delay the debut of the next PlayStation due to the shortage. Data centers seem constructed not so much out of steel and concrete but out of pure hunger and thirst – buildings of reified need for money, power, water, and every kind of computer chip, all of it never enough.
Executive Departures and Ethical Dilemmas
The second bump for the industry was a wave of executive departures. At Elon Musk's xAI, multiple co-founders departed amid the reorganization and absorption of the company by SpaceX. Elsewhere, a leading safety researcher quit Anthropic, which makes the Claude chatbot and coder, to become a poet. OpenAI fired a safety researcher who opposed introducing erotic content into ChatGPT's responses for alleged sex discrimination. Another OpenAI researcher quit over the company's decision to insert ads into ChatGPT.
It appears the AI industry will overcome the shortages of memory and executives by the same means: money. Tech giants plan to spend approximately $600 billion in the coming year alone. That amount of money exerts a gravitational pull like a black hole. Memory chip makers will sell their wares to the highest payer. Skilled employees will do the same. The losers in the memory chip shortage will be everyday consumers who need to replace their phones.
As for the executives, Musk seems to have had little trouble attracting talent despite his fearsome and multi-headed public controversies. At OpenAI and Anthropic, we have seen the departure of safety-minded executives result in little but their replacement and the continued debuts of products with greater power and potential for misuse. There is money to be made, after all – billions and billions – and this is the United States. The gravity of the cash grab in AI has repeatedly trumped ethical concerns and will do so again.
A Moral Crossroads for AI Companies
There does appear to be a looming crisis in AI, though, one which may reveal the true character of a firm that has cast itself as one of the most conscientious in the industry. A concrete version of the choice between safeguards and violent action lies before Anthropic now.
The US military deployed Claude in its raid on Venezuela that resulted in the capture of Nicolás Maduro, according to the Wall Street Journal. That use doesn't seem to have been satisfactory, though: The Pentagon is now considering cutting ties with Anthropic over the safeguards the startup has placed on its AI. After months of difficult negotiations between the Pentagon and Anthropic leadership, the startup has maintained two red lines it will not cross: the use of its technology for the mass surveillance of Americans or fully autonomous weaponry. The US military is getting fed up.
Anthropic was spun out of OpenAI by safety-conscious executives and marketed to the public as a more mindful version of the ChatGPT maker and its ruthless founder. Will the young startup choose money or its corporate morals? Google faced a similar dilemma years ago with Project Maven, in which the US military used open source Google software to better identify people during drone flights. The tech giant dropped the project but later abandoned its commitment not to use AI for weapons.
The AI revolution continues to unfold with profound implications for workers, industries, and society at large, creating both unprecedented opportunities and significant ethical challenges that will define the coming decade.
