OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has said that some companies are engaging in “AI washing” when it comes to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the technology’s impact.
“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,” Altman told CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.
This comes amid widespread layoffs and debates about the impact of artificial intelligence on the workforce.
A recent study by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that of thousands of surveyed C-suite executives across the U.S., the UK, Germany, and Australia, nearly 90% said AI had no impact on workplace employment over the past three years following the late-2022 release of ChatGPT.
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However, several tech leaders, including Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned about AI wiping out a significant part of the workforce. Amodei had said last year that he thinks AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs within the next five years.
Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski suggested this week that the firm would cut its 3,000-person by one-third by 2030 in part because of the acceleration of AI.
Altman clarified that he does anticipate job displacement because of AI, as well as the emergence of new roles complementing the technology.
“We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” Altman said. “But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable.”
Data from a recent Yale Budget Lab report indicates that mass job displacements due to AI are not certain, and not yet here. The research, which used data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, showed no significant differences in the rate of change of occupations’ mix or length of unemployment for individuals with jobs that have high exposure to AI from the release of ChatGPT through November 2025.
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“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,” Martha Gimbel, executive director and cofounder of the Yale Budget Lab, told Fortune earlier this month.
Gimbel attributed the practice of “AI washing” to companies passing off diminished margins and revenue from a failure to effectively navigate cautious consumers and geopolitical tensions to AI.
David Stout, the co-founder and CEO of WebAI, wrote in a commentary piece for the Fortune that tech founders are facing increased pressure to justify exorbitant and continued investment in AI, which is the reason why many have created narratives of AI disrupting labor and the economy through predictions of mass worker displacement.