Unlocked Today: AI is adding work, not saving time

Six years of real product data landed this week, and the finding is uncomfortable: the teams using AI hardest are spending more total time on work, not less. What changed is how much they get through.

AI arrived as a new layer of work

Linear published aggregated usage data from tens of thousands of paid workspaces, six years deep, focused on January through June. Most adoption numbers you read are surveys. This is what people actually did.

Two findings carry it. Time spent on existing tasks stayed flat while AI usage climbed, so AI stacked on top of the existing work. Total time on product development rose. The authors reach for Jevons paradox: make something cheaper and people use more of it.

Then look at who moved. CEOs at companies over 200 people went from 9 percent to 36 percent active on AI features in six months, the biggest jump of any group in the report. Every function more than doubled: product 12 to 34, engineering 12 to 30, design 6 to 22, go-to-market 5 to 18. Teams that connected a coding agent roughly tripled weekly pull requests, 21 to 65 over two years. Teams without one went 8 to 10.

What this means for you: if you sold AI internally as saved hours, your own numbers will embarrass you inside a quarter. Sell it as throughput instead. And notice who set the pace here. The executives moved fastest, and they learned it hands on.  → the data

Anthropic out-earned OpenAI, and is sizing a record IPO. Anthropic's second-quarter revenue more than doubled to $11.6 billion, with a small operating profit. OpenAI's was $6.7 billion, up 18 percent, with an operating loss that widened to $12.3 billion. First quarter Anthropic has come out ahead. Two days later Bloomberg reported Anthropic is sizing a public offering to match or beat SpaceX's $75 billion raise in June, the largest share sale on record, and could file publicly as soon as the end of this month. That second part rests on unnamed sources. Anthropic has said nothing. What this means for you: when someone asks whether any of this makes money, you now have an answer with a number on it, and it is the business side that is earning. If you run your company on Claude, your vendor is about to have audited public financials. Ask the rest of your stack for the same clarity.  → the quarter  → the IPO

Anthropic put its own AI training online for free. Claude Academy went live at academy.claude.com: courses, tutorials, badges, separate tracks for the chat app, Cowork, Claude Code and the API. The AI Fluency collection runs about 14 lessons across four hours. It is built on what Anthropic uses to onboard its own staff. Fair warning on the hype: this is a relaunch of the Anthropic Academy that has been running since spring. What this means for you: send it to the person on your team who keeps saying they will get to AI later. Four hours is a smaller ask than the thing they have been avoiding.  → Claude Academy  → the announcement

Microsoft patched a data theft flaw in Microsoft 365 Copilot on August 18. Opening a crafted link was enough. An attacker's instructions ran the moment the page loaded, with reach into inbox, OneDrive and SharePoint. No second click, no confirmation prompt. Varonis reported it in December 2025. The fix took eight months, and it is the third Copilot flaw the same firm has reported this year.

That same day, Microsoft merged its two Copilot apps and retired Podcasts, the consumer Deep Research report generator, and every Group Chat thread and image. The change was announced roughly five days earlier.

Two lessons, both from the same vendor, on the same morning. Write down what each AI tool you use can actually reach, and keep that list shorter than the vendor's default. And do not build a standing process on a feature nobody is charging you for.  → the flaw  → the merge

Unlocked Today is free. Swept by Nova, our AI news agent; edited down to what matters. Two emails a week, Sunday and Wednesday, and nothing else.

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