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2026-01-27T03:20:21.099Z
- Sam Altman said AI will “drastically slow down” the rate of adoption of OpenAI.
- Altman said the company will “continue to hire, albeit at a slower pace.”
- Altman’s comments come after a year in which job growth stalled, hitting young job seekers hard.
Sam Altman focuses on the impact of AI on the workforce, including OpenAI’s hiring practices.
In a livestreamed town hall event Monday primarily for developers, OpenAI’s CEO said that while AI has changed the speed at which the company is growing its workforce, the company is not on a hiring freeze and has not come close to eliminating human employees entirely.
“We plan to significantly slow down our growth rate because we believe we can do more with fewer people,” Altman said in response to a participant who asked if AI had changed OpenAI’s candidate interview process.
“What I don’t think we should do, and what I hope other companies don’t do, is hire very aggressively and then suddenly realize that AI can do a lot of things and you need fewer people and you have to have some kind of very uncomfortable conversations,” Altman added. “So I think the right approach for us is to hire more slowly, but continue to hire.”
Mr. Altman’s comments came amid concerns that the United States is in the midst of a “Great Freeze” and is losing momentum in job creation. The unemployment rate rose to its highest level since 2021 in November 2025, while the number of job openings fell 37% from its peak in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Business Insider previously reported that in 2022, there were about two job openings for every unemployed person, but by September 2025, that rate had dropped to one. Workers who have been unemployed for at least 27 weeks also now account for about a quarter of all unemployed Americans.
The employment slowdown has hit young workers especially hard, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. The unemployment rate for Americans ages 20 to 24 reached 9.2% in August and September, the highest level since the recovery from the pandemic recession.
