Two Sides to Artificial Intelligence and Office Space

A few weeks ago, Anthropic leased 400,000 sf of office space in San Francisco, and this week OpenAI did a ten-year lease for 439,000 sf in Mountain View a 350 and 380 Ellis Street. Then on March 1, 2026, Bay Area News Group said this: “Nearly 410,000 jobs in the region (our Bay Area region) include tasks artificial intelligence can perform, according to the latest Silicon Valley Index, the annual report produced by think tank Joint Venture Silicon Vally. While many of those roles are expected to evolve rather than disappear, others could shrink as companies deploy systems that write code, draft legal documents, design marketing campaigns and analyze data in minutes.”   At an average pf 200 square feet per employee, if you just use 50% of this projection this works out to 41 million square feet of Bay Area office space that might not be needed in the future. Of course, by then I too may have been replaced…