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Sam Altman has made an admission. Speaking at the India AI Impact Summit last week, the CEO of OpenAI told CNBC-TV18 that companies are engaged in what he called “AI washing” — blaming artificial intelligence for layoffs that would have happened anyway.

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This is a remarkable thing for the CEO of the world’s most prominent AI company to say out loud. It is also, when you sit with it for a moment, one of the most revealing statements anyone in Silicon Valley has made in years.

Because Altman is not simply observing that companies exaggerate AI’s role in their workforce decisions. He is inadvertently confessing something far more important: that the entire displacement narrative — the story that justifies a two-hundred-billion-dollar industry — is substantially, perhaps primarily, a fiction. And the truth underneath that fiction is one that no technology company wants to confront.

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Watch the needle Altman is trying to thread. On one hand, he needs corporations to believe that OpenAI’s technology is powerful enough to replace expensive human labor and justify enormous licensing fees. The product must be seen as a substitute for human capability — that is what the customers are buying.

On the other hand, he would rather not be blamed for millions of eliminated jobs. “We’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” he assured the audience in India.

The problem is that both things cannot be true at once. You cannot sell a technology on its ability to replace human labor and then express surprise when companies use it — or claim to use it — to replace human labor. Unless, of course, the automation was never really the point. Unless the companies buying AI were doing something else entirely — something that predates artificial intelligence by decades — and AI simply gave them a more respectable story to tell.

That is exactly what is happening. And the data proves it.

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According to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, approximately 55,000 layoffs in 2025 were attributed directly to AI. Significant — but less than one percent of all job losses for the year. A paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that ninety percent of executives said AI has had no impact on workplace employment over the past three years. Nine out of ten people actually making hiring and firing decisions.

Amazon cut 14,000 jobs while telling employees that AI meant the company would “need fewer people.” Six months later, the company walked it back — AI was not actually the reason. Announce layoffs. Cite AI. Wait six months. Admit AI was not the reason. The press release said innovation. The spreadsheet said cost reduction. The AI story was cover.

The freshest example is Block. On March 5, Jack Dorsey laid off approximately 4,000 employees — nearly half the company — and framed it as AI-driven transformation. Then Block’s own former head of communications Aaron Zamost published a response in the New York Times: the roles eliminated were disproportionately in policy and diversity functions. “Standard prioritization and cost management,” he called it, “not an AI-driven reinvention.” He also identified the investor dimension clearly — it matters less whether a company knows how to deploy AI and more whether investors believe it is on track to do so.

Altman calls this AI washing. I want to call it what it actually is: leadership laundering.

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I have spent thirty-six years managing manufacturing operations across three continents. I have been in rooms where automation investments are approved, and on factory floors where the consequences land on actual human beings.

Here is what I can tell you from the plant floor: the vast majority of companies ope