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Intelligence Verdict
Superintelligence watch · Date passed

Sam Altman on AI agents in the workforce.

“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.”

  • 2025the year it names
  • Jan 2025when it was said
  • Date passeddate passed
The prediction

What was said.

Quoted word for word from the source and dated. Where a span such as “three to five years” was given, the years are our arithmetic from the day it was said. Checked Oct 19, 2026.

Sam Altman · CEO, OpenAI
“We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.”
Sam Altman's blog post “Reflections”, Jan 2025 · company-reported
Who
Sam AltmanCEO, OpenAI · US
Said
Jan 2025
About
AI agents in the workforce
For when
2025
Where it stands
Date passed
Kind of source
company-reported (CEO's own blog)
What was measured

What has happened since.

Independent measures and reporting only, with their sources. One test never settles a prediction about AGI, and none measures AGI itself.

What happened

2025 has passed. In June 2025 Altman wrote, in “The Gentle Singularity”, that “2025 has seen the arrival of agents that can do real cognitive work; writing computer code will never be the same.” That is his own assessment. As a measured check, the Remote Labor Index paper (arXiv, 30 Oct 2025) found “the highest-performing agent achieving an automation rate of 2.5%” on real freelance projects.

Sources: blog.samaltman.com · arxiv.org

Our note: The page shows no explicit date; it says ChatGPT's second birthday was 'a little over a month ago', so early January 2025.

What the words mean. People define AGI and superintelligence very differently, and the definition decides whether a prediction came true. See how each lab and researcher defines them, or the plain meanings in our glossary.