Sam Altman speaks loudly on the quiet side, confirming that some companies are “washing AI” by blaming the technology for unrelated layoffs.

As the debate continues over AI’s true impact on the workforce, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said some companies are engaging in “AI laundering” when it comes to layoffs or falsely attributing workforce cuts to the technology’s impact.

“I don’t know what the exact percentage is, but there’s an AI wash where people are blaming AI for layoffs that they would otherwise do, and then there’s real AI changing different types of jobs,” Altman told CNBC-TV18 at the India AI Impact Summit on Thursday.

AI-washing has gained traction as emerging data on technology’s impact on the labor market tell a murky and inconclusive story about how technology is, or will be, destroying human jobs, or if it has yet to touch them.

A study published this month by the National Bureau of Economic Research, for example, found that of the thousands of CEOs surveyed in the US, UK, Germany and Australia, nearly 90% said AI had had no impact on workplace engagement in the past three years after ChatGPT launched in late 2022.

However, prominent tech leaders such as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei have warned that a white-collar AI bloodbath could wipe out 50 percent of entry-level office jobs. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski suggested this week that the buy-now-pay-later firm will cut its 3,000-strong workforce by a third by 2030, in part due to the acceleration of AI. About 40 percent of employees expect to follow Siemiatkowski’s lead in downsizing as a result of AI, according to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report.

Altman clarified that he anticipates more job displacement as a result of AI, as well as the emergence of new roles that complement the technology.

“We’re going to find new kinds of jobs, as we do with every technological revolution,” he said. “But I would expect the real impact of AI on work in the next few years to start to be felt.”

Data from a recent Yale Budget Lab report suggests that Altman and Amodei’s vision of the mass displacement of AI workers isn’t certain, and it’s not here yet. Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Current Population Survey, the research found no significant differences in the rate of change in the occupational mix or the duration of unemployment for people in jobs that have high exposure to AI from the launch of ChatGPT to November 2025. The numbers suggest that there are no significant changes in the AI-related workforce at this time.

“No matter which way you look at the data, right now, there just don’t seem to be any major macroeconomic effects here,” said Martha Gimbel, executive director and co-founder of the Yale Budget Lab. wealth at the beginning of this month.

Gimbel attributed the practice of AI laundering to companies passing on reduced margins and revenue from a failure to effectively navigate wary consumers and geopolitical tensions to AI. WebAI founder and CEO David Stout also wrote in a commentary article for wealth that tech founders face increased pressure to justify exorbitant and ongoing investments in AI, which is why many have created narratives of AI disrupting work and the economy through predictions of mass worker displacement.

This era of stomping around waiting for the effects of AI to take hold rhymes with the IT boom of the 1980s, according to Apollo Global Management chief economist Torsten Slok. Nearly 40 years ago, economist and Nobel laureate Robert Solow observed few productivity gains in the PC era despite predictions of increased productivity, and Slok sees a similar pattern today.

“AI is everywhere except in incoming macroeconomic data,” he wrote in a blog post last week.

Slok also said that this lull in AI-driven economic impact could follow a J-curve of an initial slowdown in performance hidden by early mass spending before exponential growth in productivity and job changes.

Economist and director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, Erik Brynjolfsson, said in a Financial Times Recent opinion paper data may tell a new story about AI really having an impact on productivity and work. He noted a disconnect between job growth and GDP growth reflected in the latest revised jobs numbers: Last week’s jobs report revised down job gains to just 181,000, despite fourth-quarter GDP rising 3.7 percent. Brynjolfsson’s own analysis revealed a 2.7% year-over-year increase in productivity last year, which he attributed to the productivity benefits of artificial intelligence starting to show.

Brynjolfsson published a landmark study last year showing a 13 percent relative drop in employment for early-career employees in jobs with high levels of AI exposure. Most experienced workers, meanwhile, saw employment levels that remained flat or increased.

“Updated 2025 US data suggests we are now moving from this investment phase to a harvest phase,” he wrote in FT“where those previous efforts begin to manifest as measurable results.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com