White House Economist Hassett: AI Creates Jobs, Not Unemployment

Seven in ten U.S. adults believe artificial intelligence will destroy jobs over the next two decades, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted in June — yet the White House's top economist says the data point the other way.

Kevin Hassett, director of the National Economic Council and a senior adviser to President Donald Trump, told the Economic Club of New York on Monday that AI adoption is expanding employment rather than contracting it.

"The studies that are out right now, academic studies, show that the labor market effect of AI is that firms that start using AI see their sales go up a lot, their employment go up a lot and wages go up a lot because the people are more productive," Hassett said.

The claim deserves scrutiny. Hassett did not name the studies, their sample sizes or their sectors, and he addressed a business audience with a policy agenda behind him. The sentence that followed, though, sharpened the argument considerably.

"The firms that don't employ AI start to fail," he said. "The market's not showing a lot of stress from AI, but to the extent that there is stress, it's actually the workers at the firms that aren't using AI."

For an individual worker, that framing relocates the risk. The threat, in Hassett's reading, sits not with the technology but with the employer's pace of adoption.

What do the survey numbers show?

The Pew survey, published in August, found 71% of U.S. adults expect AI to erode employment during the next two decades. Among adults under 30, the figure rises to 73% — a jump of 12 percentage points in two years. Several recent polls have placed concern as high as seven in ten.

President Trump has dismissed such anxieties, along with calls from leading AI companies for federal regulation.

"There is a SICK conspiracy going on against AI and Data Centers, and the only one that is happy about it is China," he wrote on Truth Social. "WHOEVER WINS AI, WINS!"

Where does the growth case come from?

Hassett compared the AI buildout to the internet-driven corporate streamlining and faster growth of the 1990s. Behind that comparison stands a concrete investment figure: U.S. spending on AI from 2025 through 2032 will total $10.3 trillion, or an average of 3.63% of gross domestic product per year, according to Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh, a professor at Columbia University.

Translated for scale: that average annual share of GDP exceeds what the economy typically invests in many traditional capital categories combined over the same period.

"What we're about to experience — because of the capital spending that we've been seeing — the productivity boom that's related to AI," Hassett said.

He added that annual GDP growth will likely reach 4% absent external shocks, and the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta's GDPNow forecast puts third-quarter growth, for the quarter ending Wednesday, at an annual rate of 5%.

One caveat sits inside Hassett's own argument: a productivity boom, he acknowledged, citing academic research, is often not apparent until it is almost over, because early gains from a new technology go unmeasured. By that logic, the current job market data offers only weak evidence either way.

"We're really, really bullish on the momentum that we have going forward," he said. Whether the academic studies he cited survive independent examination, and whether the 71% of pessimistic adults change their minds, will show in hiring data rather than in rhetoric.