Tech Leaders Promise AI Means Less Work, But Employees Clock 70-90 Hour Workweeks

Tech leaders say AI means less work - their staff say they work up to 90 hours a week

For years now, executives at companies that are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars a year into developing various artificial intelligence tools have insisted that the technology will ultimately mean people will spend less of their time working. An engineering director at Google said four years ago that AI would deliver a four-day work week by 2025. Earlier this year, and just one year after that engineering director's prediction, OpenAI took up the challenge, in a manner of speaking. It formally urged companies to start testing out a four-day work week (with no change in pay), claiming that AI will soon be able to speed up so much human labour that the corporate world should prepare itself. However, a former OpenAI technical employee who left the company last year told the BBC the firm never actually trialled the four-day work week it suggested others should try while they were there. Instead, the person described what was often a gruelling work culture marked by frequent "crisis meetings", working on weekends, and "super cut-throat" performance reviews that would see colleagues suddenly let go. "You go in on Saturday or Sunday just to catch up or make sure things aren't broken," the person said. Other companies have also pushed the idea that AI will effectively reduce the number of hours people need to work, for better or worse. Anthropic has boasted that its popular coding tool and chatbot Claude is capable of working on its own for seven hours without a break, essentially a full corporate workday. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg has said his company is in the middle of the year when "AI starts to dramatically change the way that we work" and that such tools let far fewer employees do more than they ever could have before. While Meta has since laid off 1 in 10 of its employees, Anthropic's chief executive Dario Amodei has warned that as AI tools inevitably become more productive, it could mean even broader job losses. Despite these claims, workers inside these same tech companies, who are not only developing but using the very AI tools that will purportedly perform at least some of people's work, say they are clocking in far more than the typical five-day, 40-hour work week. US tech workers are typically well-compensated, and while other industries such as investment banking, law and medicine also often see people work long hours, a 14-hour workday was not always the norm in tech. For years, it was a more typical 9-5 office job. But the former OpenAI employee said they would put in at least 70 hours a week, much more than they did in previous tech jobs. The person now works at a start-up also focused on AI, and said their work-life balance has improved, working closer to 50-60 hours a week, "outside of sprints". A "sprint" is term for a common period in technology companies in which people work long hours in the weeks leading up to a release of a new feature or product. Inside AI companies and larger tech companies working furiously on AI projects, however, such sprints can be extreme. At OpenAI and Anthropic, for instance, sprints can stretch on for many weeks and top 90 hours of work in a seven-day period, tech workers that the BBC spoke to for this story said. Neither company responded to BBC requests for comment. At Meta, workers said they have been abruptly pushed onto teams this year doing AI work being treated as urgent. They called it being "drafted", according to one current and one former employee, because people were not given a choice. "They just move you over," the former employee said. "You can't say no - or if you do, you have to quit." They said although Meta recently began to walk back that strict take it or leave us approach, by then many workers had already been forced onto such work. The hours on such teams at Meta are often long, with staff working into the night, on weekends, and feeling they are "on call" during the hours they are not working, according to descriptions of the work from the current and former employees. There are no limits in the US on how many hours a person over the age of 16 can work. In the UK and Europe, for instance, laws limit a working week to 48 hours, including overtime. Meta's current AI projects include the creation of an AI tool that can be used for software engineering and other kinds of work, and building AI model infrastructure that can measure an AI model's success in replicating various tasks, the employees added. "You're literally working in teams of people trying to replicate humans doing jobs," the former employee said. That work, the person added, seems "endless". A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Even tech workers who are not directly involved in the development of AI tools are facing longer hours due to the technology. A former Google employee, Amin Shali, left the company in May due to the ways in which he claimed AI was negatively impacting his job, like having to often work all hours of the night because internal engineering functions had failed. This was happening more frequently as Google moved crucial resources like processing units and memory storage over to AI projects. A Google spokesperson declined to comment. Since leaving Google, Shali told the BBC that his sleep and overall health had improved. He said he's realised that heavy reliance on AI tools in large tech companies "creates a bad culture with excess pressure on engineers". Some new research suggests that AI tools are making people's workloads even more burdensome. A study out of UC Berkeley followed hundreds of workers at a US tech company for eight months as they used AI. It found the employees "worked at a faster pace, took on a broader scope of tasks, and extended work into more hours of the day". Neil Thompson, an innovation scholar at MIT, said that even at tech companies leading on AI development, it is unlikely that workers are being told to simply deploy the tools that are supposed to do some of their work and move on. "It leads to a situation where even if there were real time savings, it would be sucked up by the changes, and implementing them, and making sure they worked," Thompson said. The UC Berkeley research found that the workload of tech employees was expanded in part because of the need to constantly check the output of AI tools. In a situation where an employee had smoothed out processes for AI tools, people also tend to fill any time saved with more work, Thompson added, either because they want to or they feel they should do in order to prove their value to an employer. "People assume that 20% less work means four-day weeks," Thompson said. "But new work emerges." As Shali observed: "AI is supposed to be doing so much for us now, so many more people should at least have better health and better sleep." Instead, it seems to be the opposite.

Tech giants are gaga over AI, but employees say the AI race is making their jobs harder

Employees at some of AI's biggest companies say the AI push is bringing longer hours and heavier workloads Tech companies have spent years promising that AI will help people accomplish more in less time. Inside several companies leading that race, some employees are describing an awkward consequence. More productive tools haven't necessarily produced shorter working days. Workers at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google told the BBC about punishing schedules and AI projects consuming nights and weekends. The twist is that their employers increasingly have evidence that AI really can help people get more done. AI really can help workers do more OpenAI says Codex has become the primary AI work tool across every department, including Legal, Finance, and Recruiting. As its capabilities improved, employees increasingly handed it longer and more complex jobs, while workers also used it to tackle tasks outside their usual roles. Anthropic's internal numbers point in the same direction. More than 80% of code merged into its codebase was authored by Claude as of May, while the typical engineer merged eight times as much code per day during the second quarter of 2026 as in 2024. Anthropic cautions that code volume overstates the true productivity gain, but says the increase still indicates substantial acceleration. Employees aren't getting that time back A former OpenAI technical employee told the BBC they worked roughly 70 hours a week, sometimes using weekends to catch up. Workers at OpenAI and Anthropic said intense release sprints could exceed 90 hours in a seven-day period. Recommended Videos At Meta, one current and one former employee described workers being abruptly moved onto urgent AI projects, with some assignments stretching into nights and weekends. Former Google employee Amin Shali said AI priorities affected him more indirectly. He linked overnight work to internal engineering problems as resources were redirected toward AI projects, and said his sleep and overall health improved after leaving Google. Productivity gains can become workload gains In-progress UC Berkeley research offers a possible explanation. During an eight-month study at a 200-person tech company, researchers found employees using generative AI worked faster and expanded what they attempted. Work also crept into periods that previously acted as breaks, often without managers explicitly asking employees to work longer. OpenAI itself has proposed another outcome for those efficiency gains. Its Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age suggests incentivizing 32-hour or four-day workweek trials when AI reduces routine workloads and operating costs, with reclaimed hours potentially becoming permanently shorter weeks or paid time off. That may be the more important AI productivity question. If these tools really can give companies hours of human labor back, who gets to keep those hours?

Former workers of AI tech leaders say they work for 70 hours a week at least

As AI boasts it'll make life easier for us, it doesn't seem to be having that effect on the people who develop the technology. One of the main benefits of AI, according to many of the big tech companies boasting of it in recent years, has been that it'll make life easier and more convenient. You'll be able to generate a spreadsheet, an agenda, even a short film, in seconds or minutes, and your working day will be markedly shorter thanks to it. However, according to a BBC News report interviewing former employees at Meta, OpenAI, and more, it seems that AI isn't making everyone's lives easier. A former worker at OpenAI, who left the company last year, said that they were working 70 hours a week at a minimum, with that number growing to 90-hours if they were in what big tech refers to as a "sprint." A "sprint" is the name for the period of time before a big feature or app releases, which requires workers to come in for additional hours to push it through. Think of crunch in relation to gaming. A former employee from Meta also said that there now exists something called being "drafted," where a worker can be moved to another team with very short notice and without being able to protest, as they're pushed to do more AI work for urgent tasks. "You can't say no - or if you do, you have to quit," said the former employee. New research also suggests that AI being added to the workplace is only making workloads more burdensome. Neil Thompson, of MIT, said that at big tech companies, the time apparently saved on having AI tools is then sucked away by making changes, "implementing them, and making sure they worked."