How a Crossroads in "AI-washing" Reveals Something Happening to the State of News in US
Documented causes of Amazon's most recently announced layoffs reversed between "AI" and "not-AI", but also news articles were taken down repeatedly - what's happening to the state of US news?
Roughly two weeks ago, Amazon announced more layoffs than they’d ever conducted in the history of their company.
At first, the press release from Amazon stated this was attributed to correct a period of overhiring during the pandemic, and not AI, which makes sense (due to the fact that studies have shown AI has had little effect on productivity).
Early news articles on Amazon’s layoffs stemming from overhiring, however, were either promptly removed or broken.. see below as an example:
Broken link (there are more): https://www.reuters.com/technology/exclusive-amazon-targets-as-many-as-30000-corporate-job-cuts-2025-10-27/
In the following days (specifically, Oct 29), a substantial amount of news headlines discussed the attribution as AI:
While the preceding cycle was simultaneously publishing stories (see below as an example, from Oct 29) supporting the earlier attribution of overhiring - why?
Link: https://fortune.com/2025/10/29/amazon-layoffs-ai-middle-managers-robots-factory-workers/
Finally, (Nov 1) after the heavy news cycle of AI-attribution came to an end, CEO Andy Jassy finally (again) proclaimed that the cause was not AI.
Link: https://fortune.com/2025/11/01/ceo-andy-jassy-amazon-layoffs-about-culture-not-ai/
All of these reversals of attribution (no matter what was the cause) created confusion on analytical blogs and caused a prolonged audible fight between podcasters who read different articles on the same layoffs announcement during a tech bro podcast (a podcast which by the way I can’t recommend due to tech bros who don’t seem to have used any code for 10 years and appear to be surrounded by sycophancy before AI made it popular).
This confusion is in addition to the fact that AWS usage is decreasing this year due to the economy and AWS layoffs have been ongoing this year at a rate higher than average (even for Amazon), while their past earnings call referenced AWS growth due to increasing operating margins (appearing to be an accounting move that covers up decreasing AWS usage by laying off staff in that division), a reflection of the accounting tricks with AI in tech as a continuation of the trend happening for the past 1-2 years.
What happened?
It initially appears to be a case of AI washing, which misleadingly attributes decisions made for adverse economic conditions to investments in AI, however broken URLs and a conflicting news cycle suggests something else may be happening to our news sources. It’s not clear why or how it’s happening, but the phenomenon will be interesting to watch.
Reading into the actual news content reveals assumptions that are not normally found in past news articles - as an example, another large story in AI last week (related to OpenAI’s reliance on government investment) is an accurate assessment of a highly probable direction, but poorly written with presumptions (not facts) on the company’s “request for government support” (not anywhere in that portion of the interview that the article referenced) before it was reposted by additional news outlets (headlines of which are the bulk of the reading accomplished by the audience).
Time will tell what’s happening here.