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OpenAI and Upwork publish a study on how AI is affecting freelance work
IA en un minuto newsroom · Editor: Jon Elgezabal
In 30 seconds
OpenAI and Upwork have set direct ChatGPT use against the jobs clients post for freelancers. ChatGPT is used mostly for writing, while Upwork gets more requests for video and animation; in 43 of the 63 categories, what was common in the chatbot lost ground. OpenAI sees AI-related projects as more varied, with larger fixed budgets and more hours, not a simple substitution.
OpenAI and Upwork, the online platform that matches clients with independent professionals, have released a joint study on how freelance work is changing with AI. It belongs to the Work at the Frontier series from OpenAI's economic research team and brings two sources together: what people do directly with ChatGPT between January 2025 and June 2026, and what clients ask freelancers for on Upwork in the first half of 2026. According to the full report, the ChatGPT side comes from conversations on personal accounts sampled every month.
The two platforms are not used for the same things. Writing takes up a much larger slice of activity on ChatGPT, while video and animation jobs weigh more heavily on Upwork. The study looks at 63 categories of work: in 43 of them, tasks that were frequent on ChatGPT lost ground among Upwork jobs, or infrequent ones gained it; the other 20 went the opposite way. That is why the authors conclude that ChatGPT use on its own does not explain how demand for freelancers is shifting.
What gets requested in AI-related projects has changed too. Between early 2023 and late 2025, the variety of tasks they bring together grew by 45%, the equivalent of going from about 15 equally frequent tasks to about 21, and they more often pair up kinds of work that seldom went together before, such as AI-generated video, editing and motion graphics in a single listing. Their fixed-price budgets are roughly 52% higher when compared with others of the same type of work and the same month. In hourly contracts, the report puts hours worked in the first 90 days at roughly 41% higher, while the posted hourly rate barely moves.
OpenAI sums up that the results do not point to a simple substitution: AI may be changing both what clients hire for and the scope of the projects they post. The text itself warns that it measures how ChatGPT is used today, not everything AI could do. For a sense of how big this market is, Upwork's 2026 Future Workforce Index estimates that 38% of skilled knowledge workers in the United States freelance.
Why it matters · analysis and opinion
The study takes apart the simplest idea about AI and freelance work: that whatever a chatbot can do stops being asked of a person. That happens in many categories, but not all, and the most striking part is on the other side, in AI-related jobs that are more ambitious and mix trades that used to be separate. For a freelancer, this suggests value is shifting from doing a single task to delivering a complete result that combines several. It should be read with caution: it is signed by a company that sells AI together with a work platform, it measures jobs and contracts on a single site, and it only captures how ChatGPT is used today, not everything it could do. Even so, anyone who works project by project gets a useful hint about which skills are worth combining.
Official source: OpenAI · Written with the help of AI: how we make the news
