San Francisco has become perhaps the primary example for what happens when a city’s economic and creative opportunities no longer outweigh the costs and inconveniences of living there. It’s struggled more than any major US city to recover from the pandemic, leaving critics to gleefully predict that its decline could be irreversible.

Artificial intelligence companies apparently haven’t gotten the memo. They’re flocking to San Francisco, and many are asking workers to show up in person most of the time. The city’s office vacancy rate reached a record 34% in the third quarter, according to the real estate brokerage CBRE Group Inc., yet AI companies have signed deals for more than 1 million square feet of San Francisco office space so far this year. That brings the industry’s total footprint to 3.4 million square feet, according to the real estate services company Jones Lang LaSalle Inc., up from 2.3 million square feet last year and seven times what it was in 2016.