AI is hitting entry-level jobs hardest, Stanford study finds

For years, AI industry watchers of all stripes have been warning of a coming jobs apocalypse driven by ultra-intelligent AI systems that will be able to replicate most human tasks more cheaply. Now, newly updated research from Stanford University economists suggests AI seems to be causing significant entry-level job losses for younger workers in some fields, even as older workers appear largely unaffected so far.

The August 2026 edition of “Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence” updates and revises a paper of the same name published last year with fresh data and refined statistics. In that update, the Stanford researchers find the employment trends they identified for entry-level workers last year are persisting and expanding. Specifically, employment levels for workers aged 22 to 25 in the most “AI-exposed” occupations are now 19 percent below those of their peers in fields less exposed to AI disruption.

Last year, that gap measured just 13 percent.

Not all jobs are AI jobs

To determine those numbers, the researchers used a large subsample of the anonymized, high-frequency payroll data regularly aggregated by HR management company ADP. The team then rated each occupation’s “exposure” to AI disruption using both a potential labor market impact gauge established by previous researchers (we took a somewhat critical look at that previous research earlier this year) and the Anthropic Economic Index, which looks at how various occupations actually use the Claude model in their everyday work (Google released a similar report based on occupational Gemini usage last month).