California launches first AI job loss tracker as college-educated workers face elevated risks

California launches tracker for AI-related job losses - Engadget

California has launched a new portal, which tracks AI-related job losses in the state. According to the office of California Governor Gavin Newsom, it's meant to serve as an "early warning system" for widespread job cuts due to artificial intelligence, allowing the government to proactively determine where interventions may be needed the most. The website says Newsom's office worked with the California Employment Development Department, as well as with the California Policy Lab at the University of California to conduct research to measure AI-related job losses. They use Unemployment Insurance claims data combined with AI exposure measures to come up with the figures in the tracker. Anybody can see the data for themselves, and the tracker will be updated monthly. As Bloomberg notes, the tracker was built during a time when there's increasing pressure on authorities to be more proactive when it comes to AI-driven job loss. Politicians are keen on being seen as a champion of the masses against AI, even more so for politicians in California, where many big tech companies are based. Newsom, who's believed to be running for president in 2028, recently signed an executive order requiring state agencies to develop plans for offsetting AI's effects on California workers. The tracker will let you see potential AI exposure by different groups, such as age, education, gender, industry, race and ethnicity, as well as by region. For instance, people in the 25 to 35 age group seems to the most vulnerable to AI-related layoffs, females more so than males. According to researchers who studied the data used by the tracker, however, it shouldn't be used as a definitive guide. The tracker can't actually determine whether particular jobs were eliminated due to AI, and the trends seen in it could be caused by other economic factors.

California launches first AI job-loss tracker

California has built the first state tool to watch for AI wiping out jobs. The early read: no mass layoffs yet, but warning signs are flashing in the Bay Area and among college-educated workers. Everyone argues about whether AI is killing jobs. Almost nobody has hard data. California has now built a tool to find some. The state has launched what it calls a first-in-the-nation system to track AI-related job loss as it happens. The dashboard is called the California AI-Unemployment Tracker, or CAIT. Governor Gavin Newsom announced it on Thursday and called it an early warning system. His office built it with the California Policy Lab, a nonpartisan research centre at the University of California, and the state Employment Development Department. The method is the clever part. It takes California's monthly unemployment-insurance claims and tags each one by how exposed the worker's old job was to AI. Track that share over time, and a trend should surface before the headlines do. The data updates every month, and anyone can download it. What the numbers show so far The early read is calm, with one catch. Across the state, the researchers found no sign of a surge in AI-driven layoffs. The share of claims coming from AI-exposed workers has not risen meaningfully since ChatGPT arrived in late 2022. Dig into the subgroups, though, and the picture shifts. Claims from college-educated workers in high-exposure jobs climbed after ChatGPT-3.5 launched. They have stayed elevated through May 2026. Workers in low-exposure jobs saw no such change. Geography tells a similar story. Claims rose sharply among AI-exposed workers in the San Francisco Bay Area. They also ran high in technology sectors such as information and professional services. The numbers did not show outsized jumps by race, gender, or age. "Right now, we are not seeing evidence of large-scale AI-related layoffs in California's labor market," said Ben Hyman, a senior researcher at the lab and a co-author. "But we do see patterns in certain regions like the Bay Area, in certain tech-heavy sectors, and among highly AI-exposed workers with college degrees." Why the caveats matter The lab is unusually blunt about what the tool cannot do. It cannot prove that AI caused any single layoff. No dataset can. The tracker is a signal, the researchers stress, not proof. There are blind spots too. Unemployment claims miss gig workers, the self-employed, and anyone who never files. Workers report their own job titles, and no one verifies them. The researchers also strip out the pandemic years, because that surge would otherwise swamp the trend. The honest framing is that this is an early instrument, not a verdict. The exposure score leans on two measures. One, built by OpenAI and academic researchers, asks whether a model could handle at least half of a job's tasks. The other, drawn from Anthropic's economic index, tracks how often workers actually use Claude to do their work. Read together, they give a fuller picture than either alone. The split is intuitive once you see the examples. The tool rates customer service representatives and software developers as highly exposed. It puts heavy-goods drivers and nursing assistants near the bottom. "This new tracker helps replace speculation with evidence," said Till von Wachter, the UCLA economist who co-led the work, "giving us a clearer understanding of what's changing." A political moment, not just a research one The timing is not subtle. Newsom is widely expected to run for president in 2028. Politicians in both parties now race to look proactive on AI and jobs, as voters worry about costs and watch data centres push up local power bills. California has particular reason to act. It carries the highest unemployment rate of any state, and it hosts most of the companies building advanced AI. That makes it both the centre of the boom and a natural test case for its fallout. Public mood has hardened, too. American attitudes to AI have soured even as use of it climbs. About one in five US workers now use AI in their job, up sharply on a year earlier. The same tools people increasingly rely on are the ones they fear. Part of a wider scramble California is not the first to try this, only the most ambitious. New York changed its layoff-notice rules in 2025 to flag cuts tied to AI. Connecticut passed a similar measure last month. The weakness is obvious, because it relies on employers to own up. Of more than 160 New York firms that reported mass layoffs, none blamed AI. The anxiety driving all this is not abstract. America's carmakers have already blamed AI for white-collar cuts. California is fighting its own court battle over alleged AI hiring bias in screening software. Public trust, meanwhile, keeps sliding. The harder question is what a state does once it has the data. Newsom's tracker arrived under an executive order meant to prepare workers for disruption. The same push has fed broader worker retraining efforts, some bankrolled by the AI labs themselves. Even so, plenty of insiders disagree on the threat. Sam Altman, for one, has argued that an AI jobs apocalypse is unlikely. The open question The tracker turns a shouting match into something measurable. That alone is progress. It hands policymakers a place to look first, and it lets the public see the same numbers. The limits are real, though. A monthly dashboard can flag a wobble, but it cannot say for sure what caused it. Its signals will always need other evidence beside them. And spotting trouble early only helps if someone acts on the warning. For now, California has done the rare thing and replaced a guess with a gauge. Whether that gauge can catch the damage in time, and whether the state responds when it does, is the question this tool leaves open.

The AI 'Jobpocalypse' Is Nowhere to Be Seen in California, the Heartland of Tech

As a wave of AI fervor has washed over Silicon Valley, fear of an impending "jobpocalypse" has followed in its wake. Thanks in no small part to lofty prognostications from tech CEOs themselves -- Anthropic's Dario Amodei, for example, famously predicted that AI could soon replace half of all entry-level white collar jobs -- many industries have been bracing for what they've been told will be a surge of human employees being replaced by machines. The economic and social disruptions caused by such mass displacement, so the true-believers say, will be of a magnitude unlike anything ever seen in human history. For the time being, however, such seismic effects have yet to materialize. More individuals and businesses are now using AI than ever before, and yet on the whole, the job market seems to be riding the wave without any noticeable calamity. The feared jobpocalypse is nowhere in sight. That's at least the case in California, according to data released Thursday alongside a new public dashboard designed to track the impacts of AI throughout the state's labor market. Despite being the global economic and cultural epicentre of tech, the state hasn't yet begun to experience the displacement that many tech moguls have prophesied. "Right now, we are not seeing evidence of large-scale AI-related layoffs in California's labor market," Ben Hyman, an economist and senior researcher at the California Policy Lab, a research institute within the University of California, said in a statement. There were exceptions to that general rule, however: Hyman added that unemployment claims in certain, more exposed regions (like the Bay Area) and tech-heavy sectors (like finance, education, and IT) had seen an increase in recent years, thanks to AI. "It will be important to continue monitoring trends for those workers, as well as others, so that policymakers can respond appropriately," he said. The public dashboard, called the California AI-Unemployment Tracker (CAIT), was built via a collaboration of the California Policy Lab's UCLA division and the Employment Development Department (EDD), an agency that provides financial and job-seeking assistance for unemployed Californians, among other functions. The "first-in-the-nation" tool, as it was described in a press release, will be updated monthly. It is intended to help state policymakers identify the sectors and regions most in need of support, while giving workers a clearer sense of how vulnerable their jobs may be to AI-displacement. The data and public dashboard follow an executive order issued in May by California Governor Gavin Newsom, directing state agencies to start preparing for AI-driven disruptions to the labor market in collaboration with experts across academia and the private sector. The data-tracking dashboard "provides us with a clearer picture of how AI is affecting working people and jobs, and where we need to focus support and training," Stewart Knox, Secretary of the California Labor & Workforce Development Agency, said in a statement. "By grounding our decisions in data, we can respond early and strengthen pathways into good jobs to ensure California's workforce is able to adapt and thrive as technology evolves." Leading AI developers like Anthropic, Microsoft, and OpenAI have also conducted research into the current and possible future impacts of AI on the job market, with an eye towards guiding both policymakers and workers.

New report claims AI is leading to job layoffs -- but higher-level more educated workers are being hit hardest

* Report claims degree holders and tech sector workers continue to see AI-induced layoffs * New unemployment tracker lays foundation for future employment laws * Despite layoffs, new job opportunities remain elsewhere A New California Policy Lab report has revealed artificial intelligence could actually be leading to a number of layoffs despite recent promises that the tech is creating new roles. But the data points towards certain roles being more susceptible than others. Those with a bachelor's, master's or PhD degree in highly AI-exposed roles saw higher unemployment rates after ChatGPT was released in late 2022. Insurance claims for unemployment among bachelor's degree holders rose more than 50% between November 2023 (13,000 claims per month) and July 2023 (22,000 claims per month). Claims have since fallen, but remain above earlier levels, standing at around 16,000 claims per month currently. AI still causing some job losses And California leads the way for AI-induced layoffs, with the Bay Area's high concentration of tech companies making it a likely place for labor market effects to emerge first. But the report is largely optimistic about AI's impacts on roles - although certain roles are clearly at risk of displacement, other roles still promise opportunities for human workers. "AI does not seem to have affected national unemployment rates... but has affected the headcounts of certain occupations with more exposure to AI," the paper concludes. Though region-specific, the report marks the introduction of the California AI-Unemployment Tracker (CAIT) using near-real-time data, which it says is important for guiding employment laws and support as AI's impacts on the labor market continue to evolve. Ultimately, the paper concludes that higher-level workers are being affected first, particularly in Califorina's tech sector, but the overall impact on the labor market might be more displacement rather than replacement. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds.

New California tool tracks AI-related job loss

The state is monitoring current and potential job loss due to generative AI. Credit: Anadolu / Contributor / Anadolu via Getty Images Governor Gavin Newsom isn't letting California "sit on the sidelines" as AI makes its way into the workforce. Announced today, the state will begin tracking AI-related job loss -- and predicting where jobs may be impacted by AI in the future -- as part of Newsom's executive order on generative AI. The data will be available for public use, via the new California AI-Unemployment Tracker, and will be updated with new work-related information monthly. The tool was created alongside the California Policy Lab at the University of California. "AI is advancing quickly, and workers' concerns about what that could mean for their jobs are real. This new tracker helps replace speculation with evidence, giving us a clearer understanding of what's changing and how to best support affected workers," said Till von Wachter, co-author and faculty director of the California Policy Lab UCLA. The tracker's inaugural findings don't indicate widespread AI-related job loss just yet, but do show that certain "high exposure" industries and demographics are at particular risk, including tech sectors and employees in the Bay Area. According to the tracker, individuals with college degrees who are frequently exposed to AI could be most impacted by AI's encroachment into the workforce. In an October Pew Research Center survey, around 20 percent of Americans said they used AI in some capacity at their jobs -- the rise in use came predominantly from workers under 50 years of age with at least a bachelor's degree. A separate global survey of executive leadership, conducted by the Mercer consulting firm, found that 99 percent of executive leaders expected AI to impact headcount over the next two years.

AI Took Your Job? California Wants to Know

State officials say they have not found evidence of widespread AI-driven layoffs, though some highly AI-exposed workers are showing early signs of displacement. Since the launch of ChatGPT, AI developers have warned that artificial intelligence could eliminate millions of jobs. California is now trying to determine whether those predictions are beginning to play out. On Thursday, California Governor Gavin Newsom announced the launch of what the state calls the nation's first AI-Unemployment Tracker, a public dashboard designed to monitor whether artificial intelligence is contributing to job losses in the state. The initiative adds to California's expanding goal of shaping AI policy under Newsom, who is widely viewed as a potential Democratic presidential contender in 2028. "As part of my first-in-the-nation executive order on AI, my administration just launched a dashboard to track signs of job loss from AI and better support workers who might be impacted," Newsom wrote on X. "California won't just watch this emerging technology from the sidelines; we're going to act." Developed by the California Employment Development Department and researchers at the California Policy Lab's UCLA site, the dashboard will update monthly and track unemployment claims across occupations considered highly exposed to AI. State officials say the data will help identify where workers may need retraining, job-search assistance, health coverage guidance, or other support. "AI is advancing quickly, and workers' concerns about what that could mean for their jobs are real," Professor of Economics at UCLA and Faculty Director of the California Policy Lab's UCLA site, Till von Wachter, said in a statement. "This new tracker helps replace speculation with evidence, giving us a clearer understanding of what's changing and how to best support affected workers." The move reflects a broader shift in how policymakers are responding to AI. Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders has increasingly sounded the alarm about AI-driven job loss, while Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, in October, introduced bipartisan legislation requiring companies to report AI-related layoffs. In April, New York Assembly member Alex Bores proposed an "AI Dividend" tied to AI-driven job displacement. So far, California's data suggests the feared wave of AI layoffs has not arrived. Researchers found no evidence of rising statewide unemployment tied to AI, but they did identify higher unemployment claims among college-educated workers in occupations with high AI exposure after ChatGPT-3.5 launched in 2022, particularly in the San Francisco Bay Area. The announcement comes as concerns about AI-driven job losses have continued to grow. In January, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI could eliminate up to half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years. Since then, economists have begun revising earlier assumptions that AI would primarily augment workers rather than replace them. In April, a Federal Reserve study found U.S. programmer job growth fell by roughly 50% after ChatGPT's launch, providing some of the strongest evidence to date that generative AI is affecting hiring in highly exposed occupations.

California launches tool to track whether AI is costing workers jobs

Cecilio Padilla is a digital producer for CBS Sacramento and a Sacramento-area native who has been covering Northern California for more than a decade. California launched a new public dashboard Thursday to track job losses possibly tied to artificial intelligence, a tool Gov. Gavin Newsom's office described as the first of its kind in the nation. The California AI-Unemployment Tracker was developed with the California Policy Lab at UCLA and the Employment Development Department, the state agency that handles unemployment benefits. The tracker uses unemployment data to look for patterns among workers whose jobs may be more exposed to AI disruption. The data does not prove AI caused a specific layoff, but it could show whether unemployment claims are increasing among workers in jobs more likely to be affected by AI. "As AI advances, we aren't just watching from the sidelines; we're reimagining how we prepare California through strong governance and innovative policy," Newsom said in a statement. The tracker will be updated monthly and could help the state identify where job search support, retraining, upskilling, health coverage guidance and other resources may be needed. Initial findings showed no evidence of rising statewide unemployment claims from workers in occupations considered highly exposed to AI. "Right now, we are not seeing evidence of large-scale AI-related layoffs in California's labor market," said Dr. Ben Hyman, senior researcher at the California Policy Lab, in a statement. Still, researchers said the data showed more targeted patterns, including increases in claims from college-educated workers in high-AI-exposure occupations. Workers in high-exposure occupations in the San Francisco Bay Area also saw a sustained increase, according to the governor's office. "This new tracker helps replace speculation with evidence, giving us a clearer understanding of what's changing and how to best support affected workers," said Till von Wachter, professor of economics at UCLA and faculty director of the California Policy Lab's UCLA site, in a statement. Newsom issued an executive order in May aimed at preparing California workers, small businesses and communities for potential job disruption driven by AI. The dashboard was one of the workforce-tracking efforts called for under the order.