Is Andrew Yang Right About AI Taking Millions of Jobs?

Andrew Yang, the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate who now runs the phone carrier Noble Mobile and co-founded the Forward Party, has spent the past month arguing on television and in a Jubilee debate that AI will displace workers and needs hard rules.

His jobs timetable can be tested. In an interview CBS published on 19 February 2026, he said millions of Americans would lose their jobs “in the next 12 to 18 months”, which puts the test between February and August 2027.

On announced layoffs, the forecast is running behind. Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which tracks announced US job cuts, counted 43,281 in September, 20 per cent fewer than a year earlier and the lowest September since 2022. Employers blamed AI for 3,961 of them and for 120,136 over the first nine months of the year. That is the most common reason given in 2026, but a long way from millions. Hiring is where the evidence of strain is stronger, particularly for recent graduates in the fields most exposed to AI.

What Yang has been arguing

The September push followed the resignation of Jacob Coxon, an Anthropic researcher who warned that labs were “racing straight to self-improving superintelligence”, as TechCrunch reported on 9 September. On CNBC on 16 September, Yang said: “We need a kill switch. We need real liability.”

The jobs argument came in the Jubilee debate, which Benzinga covered on 1 October. Yang said “the market will optimize for productivity and profit, not human dignity”, and compared the shift to Walmart: “Everyone went to Walmart. And the local mom-and-pops disappeared.”

His proposed fix is a token tax on AI. In his newsletter he describes paying Anthropic for tokens and nothing more, with no payroll tax, no healthcare and no income tax, and he cites Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei in support of the tax.

He still backs the plan that made him known in 2020, a Freedom Dividend of $1,000 a month for every adult. Yang promotes Noble Mobile, the carrier he runs, and his book Hey Yang, Where’s My Thousand Bucks? in the same newsletter.

How his timetable has moved

The horizon in his forecasts has shortened since December, although the 2019 warning covers a different job.

The December figure covered a decade, so it sits alongside the later claims instead of against them. In the same interview Yang rejected the researcher Roman Yampolskiy’s prediction of 99 per cent unemployment within five years: “It’s going to get bad. I certainly don’t think 99% bad.”

Axios gave no deadline for the 2019 truck warning. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted about 2.2 million heavy and tractor-trailer truck drivers in 2025 and projects the job to grow 4 per cent by 2035, so the displacement he described does not show up in official projections.

What the data shows

Challenger counts the layoffs employers announce and the reasons they give. Its AI-cited total rose from 4,680 in February to 38,579 in May, then fell below 4,000 in August and September.

May’s total was 40 per cent of that month’s cuts, a record share since Challenger began tracking AI in 2023. September’s was about 9 per cent. Over the year so far, AI-cited cuts stand at 120,136, about 21 per cent of all announced cuts. That is more than double the 54,836 Challenger counted for all of 2025.

Layoff counts miss people who are never hired. Yang made that point on CNBC, according to Moneywise’s 27 May report:

“The easiest people to fire are the people you haven’t hired yet.”

Three sources cover hiring and the wider job market:

• A Census Bureau working paper, published in September, used administrative records to follow college graduates. Outcomes for the most AI-exposed majors began to diverge from those of less exposed majors right after ChatGPT launched in late 2022. In adjusted estimates, the most exposed tenth of majors saw the likelihood of initial employment fall by 5 percentage points and initial full-quarter earnings fall by 13 per cent, a loss the authors compare with graduating into a large recession. About half of the earnings drop came from graduates moving into lower-paid sectors such as restaurants and retail.
• The New York Fed puts unemployment among recent graduates aged 22 to 27 at 5.6 per cent for the second quarter of 2026, and underemployment, meaning jobs that typically do not need a degree, at 42 per cent.
• Goldman Sachs estimated in April that AI had reduced monthly US payroll growth by roughly 16,000 jobs over the past year and raised unemployment by 0.1 percentage point. Fortune reported on 1 June that Goldman now puts the effect at about 11,000 jobs a month, while data-centre construction adds about 9,000 a month.

The Census paper and Goldman’s model tie their findings to AI. The New York Fed figures show graduates struggling without isolating a cause, and so do the payroll numbers. Payrolls rose by 29,000 in September, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said on 2 October, revisions took 60,000 jobs off the July and August totals, and the unemployment rate was 4.2 per cent. The BLS does not say why growth is weak.

So far the evidence supports a narrower claim than Yang’s. Announced AI-linked cuts are already more than double 2025’s total, so the direction fits his warning. The scale does not: 120,136 is a small fraction of millions, and the monthly count has fallen from 38,579 in May to under 4,000. His window closes between February and August 2027, so the forecast is not yet disproved. The clearer strain is in graduate hiring, where his point about people who were never hired applies. Challenger’s October figures are due on 5 November.

Will Yang run for president in 2028?

Yang has not announced a campaign, and his answers keep the question open. On Fox News on 7 February he said a 2028 run would be as an independent, because “I don’t think that either party is delivering.” He put the share of Americans who call themselves independents at 50 per cent. Gallup’s 2025 figure was 45 per cent, a record for its survey.

On the New York Times podcast Hard Fork this spring, he told the hosts that if he decided to run again, “you’ll be among the very, very first people I call.” On Yahoo Finance on 22 June he said he is asked every day and that his case, which Yahoo ties to his 2020 automation warning, “has aged very well”. In his 14 September newsletter he wrote that he does not wake up every morning wishing he were president, but that the lack of leadership in Washington makes him wish he were “in position to temper the breakneck pace of AI development”.

Writing for GoLocalProv on 27 September, he said independents need “political and operational infrastructure” to succeed. Forward, the party he co-founded, backs ranked-choice voting and nonpartisan primaries and reported six elected officials in June, including two Utah state senators. That month it announced four independent Senate candidates for the 3 November election, among them Todd Achilles, who is challenging Idaho’s Republican senator Jim Risch.

Who is Andrew Yang?

Yang, 51, was a lawyer and test-prep executive before he founded the nonprofit Venture for America in 2011.