Sam Altman is starting to get the sneaking suspicion that companies might be using the technology he’s dedicated his life to (once it turned out to be extremely profitable) as cover for their own interests. In an interview with CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit, the founder and CEO of OpenAI suggested that AI has become a scapegoat that is wrongly being blamed for the mass layoffs that continue to hit basically every sector of the economy.
“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 said.
Of course, Altman’s gotta thread the needle here. He does, in fact, need people to believe his company’s technology can replace people—that has kinda become the whole pitch to corporations looking to pour money into AI (despite little real return on those investments thus far). But he also would rather not position his product as a job killer, lest he rile the masses who are on edge that their jobs might get axed. “We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” he added. “But I would expect that the real impact of AI doing jobs in the next few years will begin to be palpable.”
That said, Altman is probably onto something here. According to data from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, about 55,000 layoffs in 2025 were attributed directly to AI. While that is a significant number of people out of work, it also accounted for less than 1% of all job losses for the year. A recent paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found that 90% of executives surveyed said AI has had no impact on workplace employment in the last three years.
Despite this, there have been a number of instances where companies have pointed to AI as playing a role in layoffs, only to walk it back later. Amazon, for instance, cut 14,000 jobs in the spring while telling employees that the implementation of AI meant the company would “need fewer people doing some of the jobs that are being done today.” Cut to October, and the company was claiming AI wasn’t the reason for the cuts. That sure seems to suggest that the company wants the public message to be that it’s innovating, while the reality is that it’s just downsizing.
People are definitely losing their jobs. Employment has been sputtering at best and in a tailspin at worst. But it does seem likely that, at least for now, that has a lot more to do with economic factors beyond AI, no matter what companies may claim.
