OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has called out a growing corporate trend of blaming artificial intelligence for layoffs that have little to do with the technology itself. Altman says while AI is genuinely displacing some jobs, a portion of companies are simply dressing up routine cost-cutting in AI’s clothing—a practice he called “AI washing. ” It’s a distinction that matters, Altman said, because it’s muddying the public’s understanding of what the technology can actually do today.
“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs,” Sam Altman told told CNBC-TV18, on the sidelines of the India AI Impact Summit in New Delhi.
The real disruption, Altman added, is still on its way.
What ‘AI washing’ actually means—and why companies do it
The term borrows from “greenwashing”—the practice of making something look more environmentally responsible than it is. In this case, companies attribute workforce reductions to AI-driven efficiencies even when the real reasons are far more mundane: pandemic-era overhiring, slowing consumer demand, or plain old restructuring.
It’s a calculated narrative choice. Blaming AI positions a company as a forward-thinking tech disruptor rather than a business cleaning up its own strategic mess.
Investors have rewarded this framing in the past, which makes it an attractive story to tell—even if it isn’t entirely true.
The numbers tell a complicated story. January 2026 saw 108,435 job cuts in the US, the worst monthly tally since 2009, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas. But AI was explicitly cited in only around 7,600 of those cases. The biggest drivers were contract losses, market conditions, and restructuring.
Amazon, IBM, Microsoft, and the pattern of walking it back
Some high-profile examples have already unraveled under scrutiny. Amazon laid off 30,000 corporate workers across October 2025 and January 2026, with its HR chief linking the cuts to AI-driven transformation. But CEO Andy Jassy later walked that back, pointing instead to over-hiring and too many management layers—”pre-meetings for the pre-meetings,” as he put it.
IBM’s reversal is perhaps the most striking. Back in May 2023, CEO Arvind Krishna told Bloomberg the company would pause hiring for roughly 7,800 back-office roles that AI could handle within five years.
Three years later, IBM HR chief Nickle LaMoreaux announced the company is tripling entry-level hiring across the US in 2026—”for all these jobs that we’re being told AI can do,” she said at Charter’s Leading With AI Summit in New York. The catch: these aren’t the same roles. IBM has overhauled job descriptions to reflect how AI has reshaped day-to-day work, with junior developers spending more time with customers and less time on routine code.
Microsoft cut over 15,000 workers in 2025, with the layoffs widely framed around AI transformation. Yet CEO Satya Nadella acknowledged in a memo to employees that overall headcount remained essentially flat—quietly undercutting the narrative that the cuts were purely AI-driven. Duolingo’s CEO made a similar pivot after announcing the company would go “AI first” and phase out contractors, later clarifying to the New York Times that the company had never laid off full-time employees and didn’t plan to.
The irony writes itself. Companies spent months telling the world AI was transforming their workforce—only to quietly admit it was really just a bad quarter, a bloated org chart, or a pandemic hiring hangover.
Real job displacement is coming—just not at the pace CEOs suggest
Altman was clear that AI washing doesn’t mean AI isn’t having a real impact. “I expect we’ll see more of the latter over time,” he said, referring to genuine job displacement. “The real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable. “
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has gone further, warning that AI could wipe out 50% of entry-level white-collar jobs in the next one to five years. Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman put a bolder timeline on it—18 months before most tasks done “sitting at a computer” are fully automated.
But economists urge caution. Research from the Yale Budget Lab found no significant AI-related labor market shifts through November 2025.
“No matter which way you look at the data, at this exact moment, it just doesn’t seem like there’s major macroeconomic effects here,” said Martha Gimbel, the lab’s executive director.
IBM’s LaMoreaux offered a more grounded take: cutting early-career hiring now risks creating a mid-level management shortage down the line, forcing companies to poach experienced talent at higher cost. Dropbox is making a similar bet, expanding its internship and new graduate programmes by 25%—its chief people officer noting that younger workers are simply better at using AI than their seniors.
For now, Altman’s view lands somewhere in the middle: the disruption is real, but it’s not here yet—and some companies are getting ahead of themselves for the wrong reasons.
