The Morning Download: Don't Wait for the AI Job Crisis

Happening now. Ebay says 'game over' to GameStop. Also, Satya Nadella takes the stand in landmark trial and Sam Altman's businesses are under GOP scrutiny.

Good morning. The time to think about AI’s impact on work is now, before it gets out of hand. AI’s presence in the labor market is felt pretty broadly, but it’s still one factor among many.  It’s too soon to know how this will play out in the next decade, but if we wait too long it will be too late to react in a constructive way.

Given the limited and imperfect information that’s available now, we can begin by looking at the areas where AI today is having its greatest effect on the job market.

The blast ratio on coding and customer service has been wide. Even in cases where jobs aren't being lost to AI, they are being reshaped in significant ways. The evolution of the technology itself through tools such as Anthropic’s Cowork suggests that other occupations and professions should brace for comparable levels of change.

Anthropic in particular has set its sight on financial services as we know from last week’s event featuring Chief Executive Dario Amodei and JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

The most important thing people can do for AI’s growing impact is to familiarize themselves as deeply as possible with the technology. AI doesn't make sense unless you use it—that applies to organizations as it does to individuals

How is your company learning to work with AI? Let us know.

Accountants face the biggest threat… no, advertising managers do. The WSJ reports on a study posted last month on the National Bureau of Economic Research website where economists asked three AI models—OpenAI's ChatGPT-5, Google Deepmind's Gemini 2.5 and Anthropic's Claude 4.5—which jobs were most exposed to AI. The answers varied.

The economists found that Claude rated accountants as highly vulnerable to AI, while Gemini assigned them a much lower exposure ranking. Other occupations where the models disagreed included advertising managers and chief executives.

Some differences came down to differences in the models, the Journal reports. But the economists also found evidence that the readings were partly shaped by which workers were already using AI. Early adopters such as financial analysts use AI heavily, feeding into how the models rank that profession.

Women are vulnerable. Clerical tasks increasingly are getting automated meaning women, who make up much of that workforce in the U.S., are at the 'sharp end' of AI-driven displacement, according to the FT, citing reports from Brookings and the International Labor Organization.

Yet one critical factor largely escapes this debate: Jobs requiring sustained person-to-person contact may not only survive AI displacement—they may well become more valuable as AI reshapes the labor market.

Don’t discount sheer human defiance. Futurism reports that a commencement speaker at the University of Central Florida last weekend was at the receiving end of a chorus of boos when she called AI, “the next industrial revolution.”

“I struck a chord,” said Gloria Caulfield, an executive at Tavistock Development Company. “May I finish? Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives...” Cue the cheers.

Google reports that hackers used AI to find security flaw. A criminal hacking group used AI to discover an unknown security vulnerability in an attempted widespread cyberattack, marking the first confirmed case of AI weaponized to find bugs for malicious hacking purposes. Google detected and helped prevent the attack before it caused significant damage, the New York Times reports. The company didn't say when the thwarted attack happened, who it was targeting or which AI the hackers used.

The episode comes amid growing concerns about AI-powered cyberattacks in the wake of the release of Anthropic’s Mythos. Last week the Journal reported that the White House was weighing a new government-review process for AI tools that the government deems to pose cybersecurity risks.

OpenAI is trying to get ahead of the news. The AI startup announced a cyber initiative called Daybreak, aimed at helping security experts identify and fix software vulnerabilities.

The enterprise passes on Grok. Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence model, Grok, lags far behind its fast-growing competitors, the WSJ's Georgia Wells reports.

The hottest front for competition among the major labs is coding assistants, an area where Grok lags, with corporate adoption of the tools driving rapid revenue growth.

Meanwhile controversies linked to the Grok chatbot likely have not helped its enterprise pitch.

In a survey of more than 260,000 U.S. consumers and workers who use AI, the percentage of respondents who said they paid for xAI's Grok remained mostly flat at 0.174% in the second quarter of 2026 versus 0.173% a year ago, according to research firm Recon Analytics. More than 6% of respondents said they paid for ChatGPT.

This month xAI signed a deal with Anthropic, giving the maker of the Claude AI model and chatbot all the computing capacity at one of Musk’s main data centers. 

• EBay said Tuesday that its board rejected GameStop’s unsolicited $56 billion takeover proposal. In a letter to GameStop Chief Executive Officer Ryan Cohen, eBay Chairman Paul Pressler wrote, “We have concluded that your proposal is neither credible nor attractive.” The company cited uncertainty regarding GameStop’s proposal, including financing and operational risks of a combined operation.
• OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s personal investments are coming under intensifying scrutiny from Republicans as the company heads for an initial public offering, with the House Oversight Committee launching a probe into potential conflicts of interest and several GOP attorneys general calling for a Securities and Exchange Commission review.
• Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella took the stand Monday in a landmark trial pitting Musk against OpenAI, making clear to jurors that Musk never reached out to him to express concerns when Microsoft made its initial investment in 2019 to OpenAI, nor when Microsoft announced its exclusive license for GPT 3 in 2020. 

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Follow Isabelle Bousquette on LinkedIn, Instagram, X, and TikTok for more behind the scenes on her tech and AI coverage, and lately, her contributions to the WSJ Leadership Institute's new Executive Resilience series, where she's profiling America's top execs about their fitness and wellness habits.

Follow Belle Lin on LinkedIn and X for her latest reporting on enterprise technology and AI.

Steven Rosenbush is chief of the enterprise technology bureau at the WSJ Leadership Institute. He also has a column. You can follow him on LinkedIn.

Tom Loftus is the editor of The Morning Download. He suggests following Isabelle, Belle and Steve on their various social channels. But if you insist, here's his LinkedIn.