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By Thomas Westerholm
Life & Trends Reporter
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Nearly 80,000 workers were laid off in the tech industry from January 1 to April 2026 and a number of people have speculated that the reason for the layoffs was a term that is becoming increasingly popular online.
"AI washing" has a few different definitions.
On Wikipedia, the term is defined as a deceptive marketing practice in which a company oversells the role of artificial intelligence in its product and it originally was used to describe the exaggeration of an AI system's capabilities.
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However, "AI washing" has become a way to describe companies using AI as a dubious excuse to conduct layoffs, citing increased efficiency as a result of the technology.
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A 'Painful' Transition
According to Nikkei Asia, the stated reason for 47.9 percent of the layoffs has been a reduced need for human workers given the productivity gains related to AI.
In an interview with Nikkei Asia, however, Cognizant chief AI officer Babak Hodjat said that it will take six months to a year before companies truly see gains in productivity related to AI, adding that the transition will be "painful."
At the India AI Summit in February, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman referenced the phenomenon as well.
“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," Altman said.
"And then there’s some real displacement by AI of different kinds of jobs.”
Lilly Irani, the faculty director of the UC San Diego Labor Center and an associate professor of communication and computer Science at UC San Diego, told Newsweek in an email that companies have been operating this way for a decade.
"Amazon Just Walk Out stores claimed to get rid of cashiers, but just moved those jobs offsite or out of the country as workers stared through camera screens helping the machine learning track customers," Irani said.
"Waymo claims to remove the driver, but there are driving support workers that supervise the car and intervene when the car gets trapped from afar.
"AI washing is a way for companies to claim they are high-tech while often reducing wages, job quality and customer service."
'A stage of experimentation'
Irani said that the capabilities of AI in the workplace vary widely at the moment and that companies are currently in, "a stage of experimentation," as company leaders throw money at the technology.
"I don't expect AI to ever be able to get good at relationship-based work such as nursing or teaching unless we lower our expectations of what good nursing or teaching is," Irani continued.
"But there's some evidence that AI is good at doing parts of software engineering like writing code, but still leaving design, testing and product management to the humans.
"AI won't take all the jobs, but it opens the door for the rearrangement of jobs. What happens depends on whether workers organize to push for technologies that serve workers rather than profits."
Irani added that she is pessimistic about the possibilities of AI for workers.
"I believe AI to be a net-negative for workers because it requires consolidated data, infrastructure and energy controlled by very few companies and their owners—even if it feels magical when we use it," she said.
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