Tech leaders say AI means less work - their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week
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- OpenAI formally urged other companies to trial a four-day work week, but a former technical employee told the BBC the firm never tested it internally and described a culture of weekend work, frequent 'crisis meetings,' and 'super cut-throat' performance reviews where colleagues were suddenly let go.
- OpenAI and Anthropic 'sprints' ahead of product releases can stretch for multiple weeks and top 90 hours in a seven-day period, according to tech workers who spoke to the BBC; neither company responded to comment requests.
- Meta workers have been abruptly reassigned onto AI teams this year without a choice — a process employees called being 'drafted' — and report working nights, weekends, and feeling 'on call' during off hours; Meta recently laid off roughly 1 in 10 employees while Mark Zuckerberg said AI would let 'far fewer employees do more.'
- Amin Shali, a former Google employee who left in May, said shifting internal resources toward AI caused engineering systems to fail more often, forcing him to work through the night; he told the BBC his sleep and health improved after leaving and that heavy AI reliance 'creates a bad culture with excess pressure on engineers.'
- Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that as AI tools become more productive, it could mean 'even broader job losses,' even as the company markets Claude as capable of working on its own for seven hours straight — a full corporate workday.
- A UC Berkeley study following hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months found AI users 'worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day,' while MIT's Neil Thompson said any time savings get 'sucked up' by implementation, output-checking, and new work — 'People assume 20% less work means four-day weeks. But new work emerges.'
Why it matters: The executives selling the AI productivity thesis to investors, policymakers, and the public cannot deliver that thesis to their own engineers, who report working up to 90-hour weeks and deteriorating health. If the companies spending hundreds of billions on AI cannot convert it into shorter hours for the workers building it, the core economic promise used to justify both the investment and the broader narrative of AI-driven job displacement rests on unverified internal evidence.
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