Sam Altman says the quiet part out loud, confirming some companies are ‘AI washing’ by blaming unrelated layoffs on the technology

As debate continues over AI’s true impact on the labor force, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said 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.

AI washing has gained traction as emerging data on the tech’s impact on the labor market tells a muddied, inconclusive story about how the technology is destroying human jobs—or if it has yet to touch them. 

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that of thousands of surveyed C-suite executives across the U.S., the U.K., Germany, and Australia, nearly 90% said AI had no impact on workplace employment over the past three years followin...