AI washing – OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has shifted from caution to skepticism about AI’s impact on jobs, saying on Tuesday he is “delighted to be wrong” after concluding there has been less white-collar disruption than feared. He also tied his updated view to how difficult it
Sam Altman didn’t sound shaken by the job-loss predictions. He sounded almost relieved.
On Tuesday, during a virtual appearance at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference, the OpenAI CEO told an audience he was “delighted to be wrong” about AI destroying jobs, adding that he expected more damage to entry-level white-collar roles by now than has actually happened.
“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 in an earlier interview a few months ago. echoing a broader set of economists and experts who have challenged the narrative that AI is driving layoffs across corporate America.
This week, his stance turned sharper. “I’m delighted to be wrong about this,” he said, according to a Reuters report. “I thought there would have been more impact on entry-level white-collar jobs being eliminated by now than has actually happened.”
“My intuitions were just off,” he added, framing the moment as a clash between fear and evidence. “People are like, ‘oh, you could have saved the world a lot of fear mongering and a lot of doom and gloom.’”
Then he explained why he changed his mind—less about the math of AI capabilities. more about the texture of work itself. He said he had underestimated the human element jobs require. In his own attempts to use AI to field emails and Slack chats. he found himself increasingly responding personally to those messages anyway. That experience pushed him to believe the impact on jobs would be different than he originally anticipated.
Altman argued that the most extreme version of the story still doesn’t match what has shown up in the labor market. “I don’t think we’re going to have the kind of jobs apocalypse that some of the companies in our space advocate or talk about,” he said.
A key part of his case is what hasn’t happened yet: while companies have repeatedly cited AI and automation when conducting layoffs. the labor market does not yet reflect a mass reduction in jobs across the workforce. Even as tech leaders remain bullish about what AI can do. there are also signs their spending may not be returning the results they expect.
That tension is visible in another high-profile corporate example. In a recent interview. an Uber executive cast doubt on the idea that the company’s AI investments had meaningfully boosted productivity—despite Uber blowing through its 2026 AI budget in just a few months. On the Rapid Response podcast. Uber president Andrew Macdonald said the growing use of Claude Code tokens had not necessarily resulted in better features for consumers.
“That link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it’s very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, ‘Okay, now we’re actually producing 25% more useful consumer features,’” Macdonald said.
Taken together. the sequence reads like a collision between expectations and outcomes: companies cut headcount citing AI. the labor market has not yet shown a sweeping jobs collapse. and even executives spending quickly on AI tools are struggling to connect their activity to measurable consumer gains.
For workers, the gap between prediction and reality can still be painful. Even if AI is not triggering the broad layoffs some feared. the cuts driven by cost pressures and productivity demands don’t wait for a perfect explanation. The article of record points out that workers are already feeling effects tied to widespread AI adoption—from Amazon warehouse workers to people in administrative roles. And researchers have found potential downstream effects for workers without college degrees. even as the loudest predictions have often focused on jobs that are easiest to imagine as “white-collar.”.
Altman, for all his confidence, did not declare the story over. He acknowledged there is a chance the fallout from AI could be worse than it seems right now—and that it could eventually come for his own job, too.
In his telling, the danger isn’t only that AI can replace people. It’s that employers may keep making decisions—whether or not AI has delivered the promised disruption—while workers live with the consequences.
Sam Altman OpenAI AI job displacement layoffs AI washing white-collar jobs Commonwealth Bank of Australia conference Uber Andrew Macdonald Claude Code productivity AI spending labor market