OpenAI Says Companies Should Trial Four-Day Work Week as AI Reshapes Jobs
OpenAI has published a policy blueprint calling on governments and employers to pilot a four-day working week with no loss of pay, as part of a broader set of proposals for managing the economic disruption it expects artificial intelligence to cause.
The 13-page report, titled "Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age: Ideas to Keep People First," argues that as AI tools take on more of the work currently done by humans, the efficiency gains should flow back to workers rather than accumulating as corporate profit. OpenAI says firms should be incentivised to run "time-bound 32-hour/four-day workweek pilots with no loss in pay that hold output and service levels constant, then convert reclaimed hours into a permanent shorter week, bankable paid time off, or both."
The document is candid about the disruption ahead. Frontier AI systems, OpenAI says, have already advanced from handling tasks that take people minutes to ones that take hours, and if progress continues, the company expects AI to be capable of carrying out projects that currently take people months. "This shift will reshape how organisations run, how knowledge is created, and how people find meaning and opportunity," the report states. "While we strongly believe that AI's benefits will far outweigh its challenges, we are clear-eyed about the risks — of jobs and entire industries being disrupted."
Beyond the four-day week, OpenAI proposes a range of measures including "benefits bonuses" tied to productivity, expanded employer contributions to retirement and healthcare, subsidised childcare, and a push to create more work in what it calls the "care and connection economy" — roles in childcare, eldercare, education and community services that are harder to automate.
One of the more radical ideas in the document is a public wealth fund that would give all citizens a share of AI-driven economic growth. "Policymakers and AI companies should work together to determine how to best seed the Fund, which could invest in diversified, long-term assets that capture growth in both AI companies and the broader set of firms adopting and deploying AI," the report says, with returns distributed directly to citizens.
The report also touches on taxation, hinting that if AI reduces demand for human labour, governments may need to shift the tax burden from workers to capital and the companies profiting most from automation.
Reactions to the document have been sceptical in places. Professor Gina Neff of Cambridge University's Minderoo Centre noted that the idea of sharing productivity gains with workers was not new, but pointed out a tension in OpenAI's position: "the difference now is that OpenAI wants other companies to pay workers more while also paying them for subscriptions to their services." She added that implementing OpenAI's proposals would require "a complete change in the political headwinds to shift the balance between labour and capital."
Some economists have also pushed back on the broader assumption that AI will transform the economy quickly. Adam Slater of Oxford Economics wrote that many transformative AI scenarios "rely on optimistic modelling assumptions about micro-productivity gains and the pace of AI adoption," and that past technological revolutions have shown productivity gains "can take decades to materialise and can also tail off surprisingly quickly."
The document echoes elements of a similar policy paper published by rival AI firm Anthropic last October, which also called for workers to be equipped with skills for emerging jobs and proposed building out energy and computing infrastructure. The fact that two of the biggest AI companies are now publishing social and economic policy blueprints has not gone unnoticed. As one analysis put it, whether OpenAI's document is "forward-thinking or self-serving will depend on who you ask."
