TL;DR

Executives at firms spending hundreds of billions on AI have long argued the technology will shorten the working week. Workers inside those same firms told the BBC they routinely exceed a 40-hour week, with sprints at OpenAI and Anthropic topping 90 hours in seven days. Research from UC Berkeley suggests the pattern is not confined to labs.

The gap between the pitch and the payslip

A Google engineering director predicted a four-day week by 2025. Earlier this year OpenAI formally encouraged companies to trial a four-day week with no pay reduction, on the basis that AI would soon accelerate enough human labour to make it viable. A former OpenAI technical employee told the BBC the company never ran such a trial itself while they were there, describing instead frequent crisis meetings, weekend work and cut-throat performance reviews. Their own weeks ran to 70 hours or beyond, well above anything in earlier technology roles.

Anthropic has promoted Claude’s ability to work unsupervised for seven hours — a full working day. Mark Zuckerberg has said AI is dramatically changing how Meta works and lets fewer employees do more. Meta has since cut one in ten staff, while Anthropic’s Dario Amodei has warned of broader job losses ahead. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic responded to BBC requests for comment, and Meta declined.

At Meta, current and former employees described being “drafted” onto urgent AI teams without a choice: you get moved, and refusing means quitting. The work runs into nights and weekends, with staff feeling on call in between.

Why saved time disappears

A UC Berkeley study tracked hundreds of workers at a US technology company over eight months of AI use. They worked faster, took on a wider scope of tasks, and extended work further into the day — partly because output constantly needed checking.

MIT innovation scholar Neil Thompson put it plainly: people assume a fifth less work translates into a four-day week, but fresh work simply appears. Any real time saving, he argued, gets absorbed by the effort of changing processes and confirming they work.

Looking forward

There is a jurisdictional detail UK readers should note. The US places no limit on weekly hours for anyone over 16; in the UK and across Europe, the working week is capped at 48 hours including overtime. That does not make the absorption effect a purely American problem, but it does mean the extreme sprint culture described here has a statutory ceiling here that it lacks there.