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AI Gold Rush Breeds Harsh 996 Work Routine In Silicon Valley
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Silicon Valley tech giants battle for AI dominance, offering huge pay and adopting the 9-9-6 culture in San Francisco startups.
AI Boom, Human Cost: San Francisco Startups Push 9-9-6 Work Schedule
The race for AI heats up, with tech companies in Silicon Valley pouring billions into overpowering others and grabbing the largest pie in the emerging market. Companies have reportedly begun poaching human resources by offering millions of dollars in a pay package. No one wishes to lag behind when things are high at stake. Everyone is ready to pour sweat and blood, literal and metaphorical.
At the center of this heated race, a new culture called 9-9-6 has emerged in the startups of San Francisco, USA.
What Is 9-9-6 Culture?
It means employees of these startups work from 9 in the morning to 9 in the evening, Monday through Saturday. It translates to 72 hours of work weekly, going away from 4 or 5 day work week culture being promoted across Europe, particularly Nordic countries for more leisure time.
An X handle named TBPN in the post said that they checked the receipts and found that the claims are “true” – Saturdays have become a workday. “The great lock-in is in full effect,” it added.
Many San Francisco startups claim they practice 9-9-6, so we checked the receipts.We worked with Ramp to look at the data and it’s true – Saturdays have become a workday.
The great lock-in is in full effect. pic.twitter.com/MbwAICe3Dy
— TBPN (@tbpn) September 8, 2025
AI War Among Tech Titans
Several big tech giants, including Meta, Google, Microsoft and Amazon, have poached the startup founders with a high paycheck to work with their teams building the smartest Large Language Models (LLMs) and improving the hot application-based technology. For instance, Meta shocked the tech industry when it announced to invest a $14.3 billion in data labelling startup Scale AI. As part of the agreement, Meta took a 49% stake in the company, hired its CEO Alexandr Wang to lead a new superintelligence lab and said it would deepen the work it does with Scale.
Since the inception of ChatGPT by OpenAI in late 2020, the official age of AI has begun. Two years after the trailblazing technology, there’s no official winner, but a sudden push to have everything as AI-laced.
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September 10, 2025, 10:22 IST
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