Sam Altman said OpenAI was planning to 'dramatically slow down' its pace of hiring

Sam Altman is addressing AI’s impact on the workforce, including on OpenAI’s hiring practices.

During a live-streamed town hall event on Monday, catered mainly toward developers, the OpenAI CEO said that AI has changed how quickly the company expands its head count, but the company is not in a hiring freeze and is nowhere close to doing away with human employees entirely.

“We are planning to dramatically slow down how quickly we grow because we think we’ll be able to do so much more with fewer people,” said Altman in response to a participant who asked if AI has changed OpenAI’s interview process of potential candidates.

“What I think we shouldn’t do, and what I hope other companies won’t do either, is hire super aggressively, then realize all of a sudden AI can do a lot of stuff, and you need fewer people, and have to have some sort of very uncomfortable conversation,” Altman added. “So I think the right approach for us will be to hire more slowly but keep hiring.”

Altman’s comments come amid the “Great Freeze” and concerns that job creation in America has lost momentum. The unemployment rate in November 2025 climbed to its highest level since 2021, while job openings have fallen 37% from their peak in 2022, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Business Insider previously reported that, while in 2022 there were roughly two job openings for every unemployed worker, by September 2025 that ratio had fallen to one. Workers who have been jobless for at least 27 weeks also now make up about a quarter of all unemployed Americans.

Based on data from the US Census Bureau, young workers have been hit especially hard by the hiring slowdown. 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.