Vice President J.D. Vance cast doubt on pessimistic predictions that artificial intelligence will replace American jobs.
The White House’s AI Action Plan contains an optimistic declaration about the potential of AI. Journalist Leighton Woodhouse questioned the White House’s predictions, likening them to the optimism around liberal trade policies in the wake of NAFTA. But Vance said that AI worries are a distraction from the larger threats of trade and immigration.
“[C]omparing globalization to tech advancement strikes me as very wrong,” Vance wrote on X. “In the 90s and 2000s, the argument was that job losses from globalization were all about automation. You’d hear people say ‘it’s not trade, it’s the robots.’ This story was so pervasive that I bought into it without really thinking about it. In fact, the link between automation and job loss was very weak. Most of the damage was done by offshoring, outsourcing, and excess migration.”
Multiple studies have borne out the idea that offshoring manufacturing was a larger driver of job losses within the United States than automation. MIT Economist David Autor said in a 2017 interview that as many as a million jobs were eliminated by Chinese imports into the United States between 2000 and 2007, responsible for up to 40 percent of the total drop in manufacturing over that time. A 2018 study from the National Bureau of Economic Research concluded that “the effects of increased imports from China are single largest contributor to the decline in employment” between 1999 and 2018, by a margin of more than double the decline caused by robots entering the workforce.
Moreover, a report from the Brookings Institution noted that “automation often creates as many jobs as it destroys over time,” and workers who can complement automation get paid more; however, the report did note that some jobs get substituted, leaving those workers worse off.
“All of the fear about AI causing mass unemployment serves to distract from the very real threat of continued job loss through dumb trade and immigration policies,” Vance wrote. “President Trump’s approach corrects this broken dependence on globalization: strike better trade deals, promote American exports, fix our immigration system, and invest in making workers more productive. To be clear, there are a lot of risks with AI. Surveillance state, theft, fraud, privacy intrusions, political censorship, etc. But I remain very skeptical AI is going to destroy everyone’s job.”
In the introduction to its AI Action Plan, published in July, the White House said that winning the global AI race was the key to unlocking major new advances in science, technology, engineering and information.
“Winning the AI race will usher in a new golden age of human flourishing, economic competitiveness, and national security for the American people,” the report says. “AI will enable Americans to discover new materials, synthesize new chemicals, manufacture new drugs, and develop new methods to harness energy—an industrial revolution. It will enable radically new forms of education, media, and communication—an information revolution. And it will enable altogether new intellectual achievements: unraveling ancient scrolls once thought unreadable, making breakthroughs in scientific and mathematical theory, and creating new kinds of digital and physical art—a renaissance.”
But leaders in the tech industry have put out early warning signs that AI puts jobs at risk. A research report from Microsoft analyzed the top 40 industries with AI applicability, most of them in the field of knowledge work, sales, and the humanities; including translators, journalists, web developers, and store counter clerks, among others.
The jobs with the least amount of AI applicability were those that involved physical interactions with people or other physical activities, including heavy machine operators, mechanics, nursing professionals, and surgeons.
Moreover, a report from the outplacement consulting firm Challenger, Gray and Christmas found that more than 10,000 jobs have been lost in 2025 due to AI.
