What makes the current moment distinctive is not that executives are misleading workers — that accusation predates the AI era — but that the most credible debunker is now the AI industry's own figurehead. Altman's acknowledgment that some companies are using AI as a smokescreen for cuts driven by other causes does not exonerate his own industry; it confirms the frame that critics had built from the outside. The term "AI washing" now has institutional weight precisely because the person who coined its mainstream usage leads the company that made…