As debate continues over the true impact of AI on the workforce, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some companies are engaging in “AI washing» when it comes to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the impact of technology.
“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s some AI washing where people blame AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s a real displacement by AI of different types of jobs,” Altman told CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.
The AI wash has gained traction as emerging data on the technology’s impact on the job market tells a confusing and inconclusive story about how technology is destroying human jobs — or whether it hasn’t touched those jobs yet.
A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that among thousands of senior executives surveyed in the United States, United Kingdom, 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.
However, prominent tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned of a white-collar bloodbath, with AI potentially wipe out 50% of entry-level office jobs. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski suggested this week that the buy now, pay later company would do just that. reduce its workforce of 3,000 people by a third by 2030, in part due to the acceleration of AI. About 40% of employers expect to follow Siemiatkowski’s lead by cutting staff across the board using AI, according to the 2025 report. World Economic Forum report on the future of jobs.
Altman said he expects more job losses due to AI, as well as the emergence of new roles that complement the technology.
“We will find new types of jobs, as we do with every technological revolution,” he said. “But I would expect that the real impact of AI on jobs over the next few years will start to be palpable.”
Signs of AI Washout
Data from a recent Yale Budget Lab Report suggests that Altman and Amodei’s vision of mass displacement of AI workers is not certain and is not here yet. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, the research found no significant difference in the rate of change in occupational composition or duration of unemployment for people in jobs with high exposure to AI since ChatGPT’s release through November 2025. The numbers suggest no significant change in AI-related work at this point.
“No matter how you look at the data, at this point in time, there don’t appear to be any major macroeconomic effects here,” Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab, said Fortune earlier this month.
Gimbel attributed the practice of AI washing to companies passing diminishing margins and revenue due to their inability to effectively manage cautious consumers and geopolitical tensions toward AI. WebAI co-founder and CEO David Stout also wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune that tech founders face increased pressure to justify exorbitant and continued investments in AI, which explains why many have created narratives that AI will disrupt work and the economy by predicting a massive displacement of workers.
This era of tapping your foot while waiting for the effects of AI to take hold rhymes with the IT boom of the 1980saccording to Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok. Nearly 40 years ago, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow observed few productivity gains in the PC era, despite predictions of increased productivity, and Slok sees a similar trend today.
“AI is everywhere except in incoming macroeconomic data,” he wrote in a statement. blog post last week.
Evidence of the impact of AI on employment
Slok also said this lull in AI’s economic impact could follow a J-curve of an initial slowdown in performance masked by early mass spending before an exponential increase in productivity and changes in work.
Erik Brynjolfsson, economist and director of the Digital Economy Lab at Stanford University, said in a statement: Financial Times opinion article Recent labor data could tell a new story of AI’s impact on productivity and work. He noted a decoupling between employment growth and GDP growth This is reflected in the latest revised employment figures: last week’s jobs report revised job gains downward to just 181,000, despite GDP rising 3.7% in the fourth quarter. Brynjolfsson’s own analysis found a 2.7% year-over-year productivity increase last year, which he attributed to the productivity benefits of AI starting to manifest.
Brynjolfsson published a landmark study last year, showing a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career employees in jobs with high levels of AI exposure. Meanwhile, most experienced workers saw their employment levels remain stable or increase.
“Updated U.S. data for 2025 suggests we are moving from this investment phase to a harvest phase,” he wrote in the paper. FT“where those previous efforts begin to manifest themselves in measurable results.”