OpenAI's Altman Confirms 'AI Washing' as Companies Misattribute Layoffs to Technology
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged Thursday that some companies are falsely blaming artificial intelligence for workforce reductions they would have executed regardless, a practice known as "AI washing" that has emerged as a new wrinkle in corporate restructuring narratives.
Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit, Altman told CNBC-TV18 that while he couldn't quantify the exact scale of the phenomenon, the practice is real. "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," he said.
The admission comes as CFOs and finance leaders grapple with conflicting signals about AI's actual impact on headcount. The term "AI washing" has gained currency as a descriptor for companies that invoke the technology as cover for cost-cutting measures that have little to do with automation or productivity gains from machine learning tools.
The confusion is understandable. Data on AI's labor market impact remains maddeningly inconclusive. A National Bureau of Economic Research study published this month surveyed thousands of C-suite executives across the U.S., UK, Germany, and Australia and found that nearly 90% reported AI had no impact on workplace employment over the three years following ChatGPT's late-2022 release.
Yet prominent tech executives paint a starkly different picture. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned of AI potentially eliminating 50% of entry-level office jobs. This week, Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said the buy-now, pay-later firm would reduce its 3,000-person workforce by one-third by 2030, citing AI acceleration as a factor. The 2025 World Economic Forum Future of Jobs Report found that around 40% of employees expect to reduce staff as a result of AI.
Altman himself expects the gap between rhetoric and reality to narrow. "We'll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution," he said. "But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable."
For finance leaders, the challenge is distinguishing genuine AI-driven productivity gains from convenient narrative cover. A recent Yale Budget Lab report using Bureau of Labor Statistics data found no significant changes in occupational mix or unemployment duration for workers in jobs with high AI exposure, suggesting the transformation may be more gradual than the headlines suggest.
The question facing CFOs is whether to trust the data showing minimal impact or the executives predicting upheaval—and whether their own companies are engaging in AI washing when presenting restructuring plans to boards and investors. As Altman's comments make clear, both realities can coexist, at least for now.
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