Bay Area AI startups are turning to China’s outlawed ‘996’ work mannequin

According to a new report from Wired, Bay Area startups are increasingly leaning into models resembling China’s 996 working culture, where employees are expected to work from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., six days a week, totaling 72 hours per week. 

Startups, especially in the AI space, are openly asking new starts to accept the longer working hours. For example, AI start-up Rilla tells prospective employees in current job listings not to even bother applying unless they are excited about “working ~70 hrs/week in person with some of the most ambitious people in NYC.”

The company’s head of growth, Will Gao, told Wired there was a growing Gen-Z subculture “who grew up listening to stories of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, entrepreneurs who dedicated their lives to building life-changing companies.” He said nearly all of Rilla’s 80-person workforce works on a 996 schedule.

The rise of the controversial work culture appears to have been born out of the current efficiency squeeze in Silicon Valley. Rounds of mass layoffs and the rise of AI have put pressure and turned up the heat on tech employees who managed to keep their jobs.

For example, in February, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told employees who work on Gemini that he recommended being in the office at least every weekday and said 60 hours is the “sweet spot” for productivity.

Other tech CEOs, including Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, have stressed that productivity among workers is king, even if that means working hours or days of overtime. In November 2022, Musk infamously told remaining X, then Twitter, employees to commit to a new and “extremely hardcore” culture or leave the company with severance pay. 

Part of the reasoning for the intense work schedules is a desire to compete with China amid a global AI race. Especially after Chinese startup DeepSeek released an AI model on par with some of the top U.S. offerings, rocking leading AI labs.

China has actually been trying to clamp down on the 996 culture at home. In 2021, China’s top court, the Supreme People’s Court, and the Ministry of Human Resources and Social Security jointly declared China’s “996” working culture was illegal. At the time, the move was part of the Chinese Communist Party’s broader campaign to reduce inequality in Chinese society and limit the power of the nation’s largest tech companies.

But the practice has already spilled over to other countries. Earlier this summer, the European tech sector also found itself in a heated debate over the working culture.

Partly exacerbated by an ongoing debate about Europe’s competitiveness in the technology and AI space, some European VCs warned that more work and longer hours may be needed to effectively compete.

Harry Stebbings, founder of the 20VC fund, said on LinkedIn in June that Silicon Valley had “turned up the intensity,” and European founders needed to take notice.

“[Seven] days a week is the required velocity to win right now. There is no room for slip up,” Stebbings said in the post. “You aren’t competing against random company in Germany etc but the best in the world.”

Some other founders weighed in, criticizing the rise of the 996 working culture and warning that it could quickly lead to burnout culture. Among them was Ivee Miller, a general partner at Balderton Capital.

“Burnout [is] one of the top 3 reasons early-stage ventures fail. It is literally a bad reason to invest,” Miller said on LinkedIn.