OpenAI has climbed to the No. 2 spot for largest office footprint in San Francisco — surpassing Salesforce, the company whose name is literally on the city's tallest building. Google still holds the top spot, though even that comes with caveats after shedding some of its Spear Tower space.

For a city that spent the better part of the last six years watching office vacancies climb to apocalyptic levels, this is genuinely good news. AI companies are signing leases, filling floors, and bringing workers (and their lunch orders) back into neighborhoods that were turning into ghost towns. The commercial real estate market desperately needed a lifeline, and Sam Altman's crew is throwing one.

But let's not break out the champagne just yet.

As one Bay Area resident put it: "The commercial real estate market really needed something to break their way after the last six years, but if there's an AI bubble drawdown, I have to think it'll turn into a bloodbath again." That's the uncomfortable asterisk on all of this. San Francisco has been through exactly this cycle before — a hot sector floods the city with money, inflates real estate, then contracts and leaves a crater. We did it with the dot-com boom. We did it with the social media era. And Salesforce's own trajectory is a cautionary tale — another local noted that the company has "dramatically reduced its footprint over the past few years," which is part of how OpenAI leapfrogged them in the first place.

The fiscally responsible take? Enjoy the uptick, but don't build your city budget around it. San Francisco's leadership has a chronic habit of treating cyclical tech windfalls as permanent revenue streams, then acting shocked when the music stops. Every dollar of new tax revenue from AI-fueled office leases should be treated like what it might be: temporary.

OpenAI's rise is a genuine bright spot. But the city's job isn't to ride the wave — it's to finally, for once, prepare for when it recedes. Diversify the tax base. Cut the bloat. Stop assuming the next big thing will always bail us out.

Because eventually, it won't.