Tech leaders promise AI will mean less work, their own staff say they're logging 90 hour weeks

[Terry]

The BBC has a genuinely pointed piece highlighting a real disconnect between how tech leaders publicly talk about AI shrinking the workweek and what employees inside those same companies are actually experiencing on the ground, workers told the BBC that sprints at OpenAI and Anthropic can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours in a single seven day period, neither company responded to the BBCs requests for comment on those claims

At Meta specifically, workers described being abruptly pushed onto AI focused teams treated as urgent this year, calling it being drafted since they werent given a real choice, one former employee put it bluntly, saying they just move you over, you cant say no or if you do you have to quit, though Meta reportedly has since begun walking back that strict take it or leave it approach, by which point many staff had already been shifted onto that work, hours on these teams were described as often stretching into nights and weekends, with people feeling effectively on call even during hours they werent actively working

A former OpenAI employee told the BBC they regularly worked at least 70 hours a week, considerably more than in any previous tech role, theyve since moved to an AI focused startup where work life balance improved to something closer to 50 to 60 hours a week outside of sprint periods, tech jobs historically werent built around this kind of intensity, for years the sector was known for a fairly standard 9 to 5 office rhythm compared to industries like investment banking, law or medicine that have long normalized longer hours

The genuinely striking contrast the piece draws out is against the public messaging from executives, tech leaders have spent the past couple of years publicly floating the idea that AI would eventually shrink the workweek, JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon has talked about a future 3.5 day week, Nvidia's Jensen Huang has said AI will probably make a four day week possible, and Bill Gates has mused about needing to work only two or three days once AI can handle most tasks, but inside the companies actually building that same technology, the lived reality for a lot of workers is closer to the opposite

The piece situates this within the broader 996 or hustle culture debate thats resurfaced across the industry, companies like New York based Rilla openly advertise roughly 70 hour weeks in their own job listings, framing intensity as a badge of ambition rather than something to hide, and the underlying tension the BBC draws out is genuinely simple, the same executives promising AI will eventually free up peoples time are, in the current moment, demanding more hours than ever from the people actually building it

Tech leaders say AI means less work - their staff say they work up to 90 hours a weekwww.bbc.co.uk