Andrew Yang, now running a phone carrier, says $3 trillion of AI spending will '100% replace millions of workers' and that his own firm has stopped hiring juniors

Andrew Yang spent his 2020 presidential run warning that automation would take American jobs. He now runs one: Noble Mobile, the wireless carrier he launched in 2025, and he introduced himself as its chief executive when he sat down for Jubilee Media's debate format Surrounded, released on 27 September 2026, to defend four claims against twenty people who disagreed. The one that matters here was his second: AI will eliminate millions of jobs faster than new ones are created. His argument was the money. "$3 trillion being spent on intelligent machines that are doubling in power every number of weeks. They're 100% going to replace millions of workers, in my opinion," he said, comparing the moment to the arrival of robot arms on factory floors around 1990. He had put the same point more bluntly on CNBC on 18 August: "We're going to spend $3 trillion on AI, and it's not going to affect anyone's jobs? That's ludicrous." What was new was the evidence from his own company. Noble Mobile has stopped filling junior roles because the software does the work, and he argued that this, not the layoff memo, is where most of the loss will show up: "my small company, not hiring five people is not a headline. But then you multiply that times all the small businesses, like I think it gets into the millions." He also recounted a conversation with the head of a listed company: "I've sat with a public company CEO who said to me, hey Andrew, I'm going to fire 20% of my workers this year. I'm going to fire another 20% two years from now... Every time it happens, I'm going to get a bonus." Yang did not name the company. His stake is twofold: he has campaigned for a universal basic income funded by a tax on AI for seven years, and he now employs people whose jobs he says the technology is changing. The claim about Noble Mobile is a hiring decision with no number attached, which is why it is recorded here as a statement and not as a job cut. The same evening he posted the one-line version on X: "If you spend $3 trillion on AI of course it's going to replace workers."