Think about the effect from the outside. Title 1: “X Consulting fires 10,000 employees: they will be replaced with artificial intelligence.” Title 2. “X Consulting Fires 10,000 Employees: Business Plan Was Optimistic, Product No Longer Works.” What impression do they leave on you? In the first case it is about an optimizationcertainly painful. X Consulting embraces the future of technology and is ready to leave employees at home to continue its development. In the second case, X Consulting comes out a little crippled: what future can there be for its product if it works so badly?
Here, welcome to the era ofAI Washing. The cuts with the hatchet are hidden behind one innovation mask. The term has been floating around in comments for some time amid news of the major corporate cuts seen in the Big Tech sector. In February the New York Times he decided to seal it in an article that also spells out its pronunciation in phonetic language: /ā-ī wȯ-shiŋ/. The system is the same used for Greenwashing or the Rainbow Washing.
The portal that monitors company layoffs
We talked about it on Fanpage.it this story in installments. The latest is these days, with the case of InvestCloud. If you want to take a broader look you can look for the portal Layoffs.fyi which keeps all this data together by putting together the news taken from Bloomberg, Wall Street Journal And The New York Times. The data is plotted from the 2020. Let’s just take the last three years:
Artificial intelligence does not replace humanistic knowledge, it makes it necessary
- In 2023 there were 264,320 layoffs signed by 1,193 tech companies
- In 2024 there were 152,922 layoffs signed by 551 tech companies
- In 2025 there were 124,201 layoffs signed by 271 tech companies
- In 2026 there were 38,645 layoffs signed by 60 tech companies
From 2023 to today according to this monitoring there have been 580.088 layoffs signed by tech companies. Given the sources, it is clear that we are talking above all about United States. There is much more behind this dismissal process, starting with hiring campaign started in 2020 when it looked like the world would become very different as we knew him.
Certain. That’s not to say there aren’t jobs being cut from the list of layoffs as well effectively replaced by artificial intelligence. But perhaps there are also some in all these huge layoff plans motivated by artificial intelligence bad decisions by managersdrops in turnover and crises from which it will be difficult to escape even with the help of some algorithms. Especially because in several cases it was not clear what the workers were being replaced with.
One of the cases cited by the New York Times is that of Amazon. The company founded by Jeff Bezos has cut thousands of jobs in recent years. In June 2025 Andrew Jassy he said in a post: “With the implementation of generative artificial intelligence and increasingly advanced AI agents, the way we work should change.” Amazon later retracted the link between cuts and artificial intelligence: according to NYT it would be freeing up funds to invest in building new ones data centers.
When artificial intelligence covers platoons of developers
There is also a second meaning of AI Washing. In addition to justifying cuts in the company, AI can also become excellent for giving a dusting of glitter on dusty products. There have already been several cases of startups claiming to use algorithms to optimize processes and then delegating everything to legions of developers. Possibly remotely.
This is the sensational case of Bulder.AI, a startup that in recent years had managed to raise funds from dozens of investors. He said he had developed a platform capable of create apps and websites on request. In the summer of 2025, it emerged that some of the work the startup was selling as AI had been done by hundreds of technicians under contract in India. Not all AI is code.
