I wrote in June that AI was becoming the new backdoor layoff. Companies would use "AI efficiency gains" as cover for not hiring people back. October 2025 proved me right—but not in the way I expected.

153,074 job cuts announced in October. That's triple last year's October and the worst since 2003. AI was cited for 31,039 of those cuts. Tech got destroyed: 33,281 jobs gone in a single month, six times September's number.

But here's the part I didn't see coming: most companies citing AI aren't actually replacing workers with automation. They're using "AI transformation" as PR cover for something much simpler—correcting pandemic overhiring while avoiding the word "layoff."

The Numbers Don't Add Up

The Challenger, Gray & Christmas October report breaks down the stated reasons for cuts:

Cost-cutting was the #1 reason. AI was #2. But when you look at who's cutting and what they're saying, the story gets interesting.

Amazon cut 14,000 corporate jobs. CEO Andy Jassy told GeekWire the layoffs weren't "financially driven" or "AI-driven"—it's about "culture" and staying "nimble." Except six months earlier, the same CEO wrote in a memo that AI would reduce their corporate workforce over time.

Which is it?

Google cut 100+ design roles from their cloud unit while ramping up AI infrastructure spending. Intel's cutting 15% of its global workforce (about 25,000 people) after overinvesting in chip manufacturing. Meta spent $19.37 billion on AI this year—double last year—while letting people go.

The pattern is clear. Companies are using "AI transformation" to avoid saying "we hired too many people in 2021 and now we're fixing it."

The AI Washing Problem

Here's what's actually happening. 79% of US CEOs said they fear losing their jobs if they don't deliver measurable AI-driven business gains within two years. That creates an incentive to blame AI for layoffs even when the real reason is overcapacity, economic pressure, or cost-cutting.

Business professors are calling it "AI washing." If you tell investors you're firing workers because AI can replace them, they cheer. If you tell them you overhired during the pandemic boom, they punish your stock.

Wall Street rewards "AI transformation." Wall Street punishes "we made hiring mistakes."

The warehousing sector tells the real story. Those 47,878 cuts (a 4,700% month-over-month increase) aren't AI washing—that's actual automation. Robots replacing humans in distribution centers. Year-to-date, warehousing has cut 90,418 jobs, up 378% from last year.

That's what automation-driven layoffs look like. Compare that to Amazon's "culture" excuse or Google's "design role optimization."

What I'm Seeing in San Francisco

The tech jobs getting cut aren't the ones AI can replace yet. They're middle management, project coordinators, design researchers—roles companies added when headcount growth was the metric everyone cared about.

The AI jobs everyone promised would replace them? Still mostly infrastructure spending. More GPUs, more AI researchers, more "alignment engineers." Not the distributed workforce of AI-augmented individual contributors we were told would emerge.

Friends who got cut aren't hearing "your role is automated now." They're hearing "we're restructuring" or "eliminating redundancy" or my favorite: "evolving our organizational structure."

One person told me their entire team got eliminated three months after leadership presented a roadmap showing AI would "10x their productivity." The AI tools never materialized. The headcount reduction did.

The Uncomfortable Truth

Some of these cuts ARE automation-driven. That warehousing number isn't a typo. Distribution centers are replacing humans with robots at scale. Manufacturing is next. Customer service is already there.

But the white-collar tech layoffs? Most of those are pandemic correction dressed up as AI strategy. Companies hired aggressively in 2021 based on growth assumptions that proved wildly optimistic. When reality hit, they needed to right-size their workforce.

The difference between now and two years ago is the narrative. In 2022-2023, companies announced layoffs and took the stock hit. In 2025, they announce "AI-driven efficiency improvements" and get rewarded.

Same outcome, better optics.

We're past 1 million job cuts for 2025—faster than any year since the pandemic. Employers announced only 488,077 planned hires through October, down 35% from last year. That's the lowest since 2011.

The question isn't whether AI will replace jobs. It will. The question is whether we're honest about what's happening right now. October's data suggests we're not.

Next time you hear a company cite "AI transformation" for layoffs, check whether they're actually deploying AI or just deploying euphemisms. The Challenger report tracks this monthly. Watch for the gap between "AI cited" and actual automation deployment.

That gap is where the AI washing happens.