A company might lay people off for any number of reasons: It didn’t meet financial targets. It overhired. Tariffs, or the loss of a big client, rocked it.
But lately, many companies are highlighting a new factor: artificial intelligence. Executives, anticipating significant changes from the technology, are now making cuts.
AI was cited in the announcements of more than 50,000 layoffs in 2025, according to Challenger, Gray & Christmas, a research firm.
Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is cutting 16,000 corporate jobs, in addition to the 14,000 it previously announced in the fall. In a June blog post, Andrew Jassy, the CEO, said, “As we roll out more generative AI and agents, it should change the way our work is done,” adding that “in the next few years, we expect that this will reduce our total corporate workforce.” (He later walked back the connection between layoffs and AI, and the company has since said the reason for most of the cuts was reducing bureaucracy. Most analysts, however, believe Amazon is cutting jobs to clear money for AI investments, such as data centers.)
Pinterest said last month that it would cut about 15% of its workforce, partly because it would be “reallocating resources to AI-focused roles.” And Hewlett-Packard’s CEO, Enrique Lores, said on a November investor call, “We see a significant opportunity to embed AI into HP,” which would lead to as many as 6,000 job cuts in the coming years.
Investors may applaud such preemptive moves. But some skeptics (including media outlets) suggest that corporations are disingenuously blaming AI for layoffs, or “AI-washing.” As market research firm Forrester put it in a January report: “Many companies announcing A.I.-related layoffs do not have mature, vetted A.I. applications ready to fill those roles, highlighting a trend of ‘A.I.-washing’ — attributing financially motivated cuts to future A.I. implementation.”
The term echoes popular descriptors of misleading marketing practices, such as greenwashing and ethics washing. It started bubbling up a few years ago, mostly to call out companies that claimed to be using AI when they weren’t. But lately, it has been used more broadly to gesture at companies emphasizing AI to explain things like layoffs when the picture may be more complex.
“Companies are saying that ‘We’re anticipating that we’re going to introduce AI that will take over these jobs,’” said Peter Cappelli, a professor at the Wharton School. “But it hasn’t happened yet. So that’s one reason to be skeptical.”
This type of anticipatory layoff, said Molly Kinder, a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution who studies AI and work, allows executives to signal to the market: “I’m cutting-edge, I’ve adopted AI, and I’ve figured out savings.” It’s a “very investor-friendly message,” she said, much more so than “the business is ailing.”
Of course, AI may well end up transforming the job market, in tech and beyond. But a recent study Kinder worked on for the Yale Budget Lab found that artificial intelligence has not yet meaningfully shifted the overall market. Tech firms have cut more than 700,000 employees globally since 2022, according to Layoffs.fyi, which tracks industry job losses. But much of that was a correction for overhiring during the pandemic.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
