If you sell writing, design or development as a freelancer, the question hanging over the past two years has been whether ChatGPT is taking your work. A joint report from OpenAI and Upwork, The Rebundling of Freelance Work in the AI Age, gives a more mixed answer. AI appears to be changing which tasks clients pay for and how they bundle them, rather than simply removing freelance work.
The method compares two very different data sets. On one side are more than 36,000 sampled ChatGPT conversations, classified into Upwork's own work categories; on the other, Upwork job postings. The mixes differ sharply. ChatGPT use leans towards writing and advice, while Upwork postings lean towards technical implementation and visual production, such as graphic and presentation design, video and animation, quality-assurance testing, mobile and web development and digital marketing. That pattern fits businesses doing more of the talking-through themselves and still hiring people to build and deliver.
The substitution story holds only in part. Across 63 matched work categories, 43, or 68.3%, moved the way a simple substitution model would predict: categories heavy in ChatGPT use lost share of Upwork postings, and lighter ones gained. The other 20 did not. Six categories with high ChatGPT use still gained share, and 14 with low use lost it. The authors read this as evidence that ChatGPT use alone does not explain changes in freelance demand.
The money finding is the most useful for freelancers. After accounting for work category and posting month, fixed-price budgets for AI-related postings are about 52% higher than for other work, while posted hourly rates differ by only about 1.5%. Hours worked in the first 90 days on hired AI-related hourly contracts are about 41% higher. In other words, AI jobs are bigger, not better paid per hour. The mix within AI-related work is also widening: the effective number of task clusters rose from 14.6 to 21.2 between early 2023 and late 2025, about 45%, spreading into AI integration, AI-generated video and marketing automation. For anyone using ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini to widen what they offer clients, that is the opportunity the data points to.
The limits deserve weight. OpenAI and Upwork both have an interest in a reassuring story, and the report was written by their staff. The data sets are not matched, and the authors say the comparisons are descriptive and do not identify a causal effect of ChatGPT on demand. Upwork is one marketplace of remote, digital work, not the wider labour market, and the period covered ends in 2026, before the latest agent tools had time to show up.