As debate continues over AI’s true impression on the labor pressure, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned some corporations are participating in “AI washing” in relation to layoffs, or falsely attributing workforce reductions to the expertise’s impression.
“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 advised CNBC-TV18 on the India AI Affect Summit on Thursday.
AI washing has gained traction as rising information on the tech’s impression on the labor market tells a muddied, inconclusive story about how the expertise is destroying human jobs—or if it has but to the touch them.
A examine revealed this month by the Nationwide Bureau of Financial Analysis, for instance, discovered that of hundreds of surveyed C-suite executives throughout the U.S., the U.Okay., Germany, and Australia, almost 90% mentioned AI had no impression on office employment over the previous three years following the late-2022 launch of ChatGPT.
Nevertheless, outstanding tech leaders like Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned of a white-collar massacre, with AI doubtlessly wiping out 50% of entry-level workplace jobs. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski instructed this week the buy-now, pay-later agency would cut back its 3,000-person workforce by one-third by 2030 partially due to the acceleration of AI. Round 40% of employers anticipate to observe Siemiatkowski’s lead in culling employees down the road on account of AI, in line with the 2025 World Financial Discussion board Way forward for Jobs Report.
Altman clarified he anticipates extra job displacement on account of AI, in addition to the emergence of recent roles complementing the expertise.
“We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” he mentioned. “But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable.”
Indicators of AI washing
Information from a current Yale Funds Lab report suggests Altman and Amodei’s imaginative and prescient of mass employee displacement from AI isn’t sure and isn’t but right here. Utilizing information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Present Inhabitants Survey, the analysis discovered no important variations within the price of change of occupations’ combine or size of unemployment for people with jobs which have excessive publicity to AI from the discharge of ChatGPT by way of November 2025. The numbers instructed no important AI-related labor adjustments at this juncture.
“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, government director and cofounder of the Yale Funds Lab, advised Fortune earlier this month.
Gimbel attributed the observe of AI washing to corporations passing off diminished margins and income from a failure to successfully navigate cautious customers and geopolitical tensions to AI. WebAI cofounder and CEO David Stout additionally wrote in a commentary piece for Fortune that tech founders are dealing with elevated strain to justify exorbitant and continued funding in AI, which is the explanation why many have created narratives of AI disrupting labor and the economic system by way of predictions of mass employee displacement.
This period of toe-tapping in anticipate the consequences of AI to take maintain rhymes with the Eighties IT growth, in line with Apollo World Administration chief economist Torsten Slok. Practically 40 years in the past, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow noticed little productiveness good points within the PC age, regardless of prognostications of a productiveness surge, and Slok sees the same sample immediately.
“AI is everywhere except in the incoming macroeconomic data,” he wrote in a weblog publish final week.
Proof of AI’s impression on jobs
Slok additionally mentioned this lull in AI-driven financial impression may observe a J-curve of an preliminary slowdown in efficiency obscured by early mass spending earlier than an exponential surge in productiveness and labor adjustments.
Economist and Stanford College’s Digital Financial system Lab director Erik Brynjolfsson mentioned in a Monetary Occasions op-ed current labor information could also be telling a brand new story of AI certainly impacting productiveness and labor. He famous a decoupling of job progress and GDP progress mirrored within the newest revised job numbers: Final week’s jobs report revised down job good points to simply 181,000, regardless of fourth-quarter GDP monitoring up 3.7%. Brynjolfsson’s personal evaluation revealed a 2.7% year-over-year productiveness bounce final yr, which he attributed to AI’s productiveness advantages starting to peek by way of.
Brynjolfsson revealed a landmark examine final yr displaying a 13% relative decline in employment for early-career staff with jobs with excessive ranges of AI publicity. Most skilled employees, in the meantime, noticed employment ranges that remained steady or grew.
“The updated 2025 U.S. data suggests we are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase,” he wrote within the FT, “where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output.”
