Sam Altman thinks AI is being unduly blamed for layoffs

As major employers have slashed jobs over the past year, many have cited artificial intelligence or automation to justify the cuts. AI was referenced in nearly 55,000 layoffs in 2025, according to outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas—and the latest figures suggest that trend is continuing in 2026 alongside a record-high surge in job cuts, which crossed 108,000 in January alone. 

But economists and experts have repeatedly said that employment data does not indicate AI is replacing jobs en masse. And it seems even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares this skepticism over whether AI is actually responsible for the layoffs roiling the workforce. 

“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 interview during the AI Impact Summit in New Delhi this week. “I expect we’ll see more of the latter over time.” 

There are plenty of potential explanations for ongoing layoffs, from the Trump administration’s immigration policy to broader economic uncertainty, but business leaders have been quick to cite AI. Companies like Citigroup have claimed AI will “reshape how work gets done” and have alerted employees to additional layoffs in the coming months. UPS has cut tens of thousands of jobs over the past year, and CEO Carol Tomé claimed automation is a core part of the business becoming more efficient. Tech companies like Amazon and Microsoft have declared AI will revolutionize how they work, all the while trimming headcount under the guise of becoming leaner. 

Despite what business leaders say about the promise of AI, however, research shows that the labor market has not yet seen a dip in employment across the jobs that are most likely to be disrupted. Unemployment figures also do not indicate that workers are being replaced by AI in significant numbers, at least not yet. 

Altman noted, as many experts have, that AI would likely disrupt more jobs over time. “Of course we’ll find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every tech revolution,” he told CNBC’s India affiliate, TV18. Altman added that the impact of AI will be “palpable” in the coming years. 

Some AI leaders have been more forceful than Altman: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs as soon as five years from now. It’s true that AI adoption is starting to affect more junior roles, particularly in the spheres of tech and finance. Early-career workers in sectors like software engineering and customer service have, in fact, seen a 13% decline in employment since 2022, and unemployment among recent college graduates is on the rise. And while it’s more difficult to quantify how AI is changing the nature of work, it is clear that the technology is transforming how people do their jobs, particularly across HR and software engineering. 

But Altman argues it’s not just entry-level jobs or engineering roles that might be on the chopping block soon. 

Altman went so far as to say that CEOs could eventually lose jobs to AI, too—including himself—if superintelligence becomes a reality and AI can perform at a level that outpaces humans. 

“AI superintelligence at some point on its development curve would be capable of doing a better job being the CEO of a major company than any executive—certainly me,” he said. In other words, the CEOs who are currently using AI as a rationale for layoffs might find themselves out of a job for that very reason in the not-too-distant future.