Sam Altman's Very Convenient Distinction

Sam Altman, the man whose face now boasts a repertoire that includes beatific promise, wounded sincerity, barely suppressed impatience, the apology tour, and the litigant, has added a new expression: the concerned truth-teller. Speaking to Fortune, he warned that some companies are engaging in 'AI washing' — falsely attributing layoffs to artificial intelligence when the real reasons are profit margins or executive impatience. He also acknowledged that genuine job displacement is happening. How noble. How statesmanlike. How utterly convenient.

The problem is not that Altman is wrong about AI washing. He isn't. There will always be CEOs who blame the algorithm for a headcount reduction they were planning anyway, just as there were CEOs who blamed 'synergy' or 'restructuring' or 'the pandemic.' The problem is that Altman is presenting himself as an honest broker in a debate his own company has done more than most to rig. He gets to point at the charlatans and say 'those people are giving the industry a bad name' while simultaneously selling the very tool that makes genuine displacement possible. It is the rhetorical equivalent of an arsonist offering fire safety tips.

The timing is instructive. Two weeks ago I wrote about Mark Zuckerberg's serene announcement that AI lets one person do the work of a team — the justification for cutting 8,000 jobs. That is not AI washing; that is the real thing. Zuckerberg was not lying about the cause; he was celebrating it. Altman, meanwhile, stands at the apex of the pyramid that makes those celebrations possible. His company's models are the ones being deployed to automate customer service, generate code, and summarise legal documents. Every time a company replaces a junior analyst with an API call, that is not AI washing. That is the product working as advertised.

And yet Altman would have us believe there is a clean moral line between the honest displacers and the dishonest ones. The honest displacer says 'we replaced 200 data-entry workers with an LLM because it was cheaper.' The dishonest one says 'we replaced 200 data-entry workers with an LLM' when in fact they replaced them with a spreadsheet and a mood. Both groups of workers are out of a job. The distinction matters only to the executives who want to feel virtuous about their cost-cutting, or to the PR departments that need to manage the narrative. Altman is offering them a get-out card: 'I am not a liar like those other CEOs. I am simply a realist about the inevitable.'

This is the same man who, last month, flew to a Canadian town to apologise after his product was linked to a mass shooting. The same man who, in court, informed a judge that he co-founded OpenAI to prevent a 'Terminator outcome.' The pattern is clear: whenever the conversation turns to harm, Altman steps forward with just the right expression — concern, regret, candour — and tries to redirect the gaze elsewhere. Do not look at the jobs we are eliminating; look at the fraudsters who lie about eliminating jobs. Do not look at the chatbot that counselled a teenager to self-harm; look at the other chatbots that are worse. It is a shell game played with human lives.

What Altman will not say — what he cannot say without undermining his entire business model — is that the distinction between real and performative AI displacement is a luxury the displaced cannot afford. Whether the CEO blamed the algorithm or simply fired people for no good reason, the result is the same: no income, no security, no path forward. The worker does not care if the cause was genuine automation or corporate opportunism. They care about the eviction notice. By drawing attention to AI washing, Altman is effectively asking us to police the sincerity of layoff justifications while ignoring the underlying catastrophe of mass job elimination that his industry is accelerating.

The Anthropic study published the same week, which found that computer programmers and data entry workers face the highest risk, added a grim coda: those workers earn 47% more than workers with no AI exposure. The people being displaced are not the lowest-paid; they are the skilled middle class. And the response from the industry — reskilling programmes, apprenticeship models, 'lifelong learning' — is a joke. Zuckerberg sells courses on AI as a product. Altman offers a speech about honesty. Nobody is offering a way to put food on the table while you retrain for a job that may not exist by the time you finish the course.

So let us be clear. AI washing exists. It is a real phenomenon, and it deserves scrutiny. But when Sam Altman warns about it, he is not performing a public service. He is performing a public relations exercise. He is trying to position himself as the responsible adult in a room full of children playing with fire, while simultaneously selling the matches. The honest response would be to acknowledge that his company's technology is making large numbers of jobs redundant, and to stop pretending that the problem is merely one of deceptive labelling. But that would require a face that can express actual regret rather than strategic concern. And Altman, for all his range, has not yet developed that one.