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OpenAI said its research teams now rely on AI coding agents for more work-hours than human researchers themselves. The company reported 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday by mid-August. It said agent use has sharply increased, boosting code output and experiments, while noting that human oversight remains necessary for complex tasks.

OpenAI has published a detailed self-assessment of how AI coding agents are changing the pace and shape of research inside the company, revealing that its research staff now collectively rely on agents for more work-hours than they put in themselves.

According to the company, as of mid-August, its research organisation was drawing on the equivalent of 3.1 agent-workdays - measured against a standard eight-hour shift - for every workday logged by a human researcher, a threshold the company says it crossed only since June.

Usage climbing sharply across the board

OpenAI said that at the start of the year, the median researcher tracked by internal usage metrics was using coding agents only sparingly. By mid-August, that same median researcher was spending more than $600 a day on inference at API pricing, integrating agents into daily work, while the heaviest users - the top 10th percentile - were running through more than $7,000 worth of tokens daily. The company noted that this growth in usage is outpacing every other function at OpenAI, with output for the typical research employee rising 124-fold since December.

The trend extends to how many researchers are running multiple agents side by side. OpenAI said the share of researchers juggling four or more concurrent agent sessions - counting both agents launched directly and further sub-agents they spawn has been steadily climbing through the year.