How Quickly Will A.I. Agents Rip Through the Economy?

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

News, Government, Society & Culture

4.3 • 14.5K Ratings

🗓️ 24 February 2026

⏱️ 98 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A.I. agents are here. Have they changed your life yet? The release of agents like Claude Code marked a new pivot point in the history of A.I. We are leaving the chatbot era and entering the agentic era — where A.I. is capable of completing all kinds of tasks on its own, and even collaborating and communicating with other A.I. It isn’t clear yet whether these models actually make their users meaningfully more productive. But the technology is continuing to improve; there are few signs that it is close to plateauing. So what might this new era mean for our economy, our labor market and our kids? Clark is a co-founder of Anthropic, the company behind Claude and Claude Code. His newsletter, Import AI, has been one of my go-to reads to track the capabilities of different models over the years. In this conversation, I ask him to share how he sees this moment — how the technology is changing, whether it is leading to meaningful changes in how we work and think, and how policy needs to or can change in response to any job displacement on the horizon. Mentioned: “Import AI” by Jack Clark “2026: This is AGI” by Pat Grady and Sonya Huang “Why and How Governments Should Monitor AI Development” by Jess Whittlestone and Jack Clark “Anthropic’s Chief on A.I.: ‘We Don’t Know if the Models Are Conscious’", Interesting Times with Ross Douthat Book Recommendations: A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin The True Believer by Eric Hoffer There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at ezrakleinshow@nytimes.com. You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs. This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld, with additional mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Kristin Lin, Emma Kehlbeck, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The The thing about covering AI over the past few years is that we're typically talking about the future. Every new model,
0:39.1	impressive as it was, seemed like proof of concept for the models it would be coming soon.
0:44.0	The models that could actually do useful work on their own reliably. The models it would actually
0:49.7	make jobs obsolete or new things possible. What would those models mean for labor markets, for our kids,
0:58.0	for our politics, for our world? I think that period in which we're always talking about the
1:02.9	future, I think it's over now. Those models we were waiting for, the sci-fi-sounding models
1:08.4	that could program on their own and do so faster and better than most coders.
1:12.7	The models that could begin writing their own code to improve themselves.
1:16.3	Those models are here now.
1:17.8	They're here in ClaudeCodeC from Anthropic.
1:20.0	They're here in Codex from OpenAI.
1:22.3	They are shaking the stock market.
1:24.1	The S&B 500 Software Industry Index has fallen by 20% wiping billions of dollars
1:29.9	in value out. Excellent engineers, people I've known for years, people who are quite skeptical
1:34.4	of AI hype, they're emailing me now to say they don't see how their job will possibly exist
1:39.5	in a year or two. We are at a new stage of AI development. Not just development. We are at a new stage of
1:46.8	AI products. I thought the way Sequoia, the venture capital firm put it, was actually pretty
1:52.1	helpful. The AI applications of 2023 and 2024 were talkers. Some were very sophisticated
1:59.6	conversationalists, but their impact was limited.
2:03.0	The AI applications of 2026 and 2027 will be doers.
2:08.8	Or to put it differently, something that's been predicted for a long time has now happened.
	...

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