Sam Altman’s No-Apocalypse Gambit

Here is Sam Altman, the man whose company sells the very tools CEOs cite when they fire people, declaring that artificial intelligence is unlikely to lead to a global ‘jobs apocalypse.’ He said it on Tuesday, with the air of a man who has just discovered that the fire he started is not, in fact, an inferno. ‘The technology has not claimed as many white-collar jobs as I had feared,’ he added, as though his earlier fear was a noble concern rather than a convenient marketing pitch.

This is the same Sam Altman whose previous public statements have oscillated between ‘we need to prepare for mass displacement’ and ‘don’t worry, new jobs will emerge’ with the consistency of a broken weather vane. And it arrives exactly one day after Groupon — yes, Groupon — announced it would cut 400 jobs to ‘support its AI-native strategy.’ The daily deal company that peaked in 2012 is now blaming artificial intelligence for its inability to stay relevant, a move so absurd it deserves its own episode of a sitcom.

Let us pause to admire the symmetry. In my column two weeks ago, I noted that the AI layoff excuse has become a corporate standard — a euphemism so widespread that it barely registers as news. Cisco, Block, Cloudflare, Meta: each draped redundancies in the language of technological inevitability. Not a prediction — a promise. They are budgeting for it. And now the man who supplies the raw material for that excuse tells us not to worry. Wonderful.

Altman’s gambit is transparent. OpenAI’s business model depends on selling subscriptions and API access to those same CEOs. If the public believes that AI will cause mass unemployment, governments might regulate, customers might revolt, and the whole party ends. So Altman must perform optimism — must assure everyone that, actually, it will all be fine, probably, maybe. Meanwhile, the CEOs who buy his product are using it to justify layoffs that, in many cases, have little to do with actual automation. Groupon does not suddenly have 400 roles that can be replaced by an LLM; it has a dying business model and a convenient narrative.

The research supports this. A recent study found that work-from-home practices are a stronger predictor of reduced entry-level hiring than generative AI. The real driver of job woes isn’t the technology — it’s corporate cost-cutting dressed up as futurism. Altman knows this. He is not stupid. But he has a product to sell, and the truth is bad for business.

So here we are, caught between two performances. The CEOs perform technological inevitability to justify layoffs. Altman performs reassurance to keep the regulatory wolves at bay. The workers caught in between get nothing but a press release and a severance calculation. The jobs apocalypse is not coming; it is already here, but it has nothing to do with AI. It is an apocalypse of excuses, and everyone is reading from the same script.