OpenAI reports AI "research interns" and warns about its own pace at the same time

The company says it has reached the goal it announced last fall of an "automated research intern," a system that handles clearly scoped research tasks under human guidance, including ones that would take an experienced researcher several days.

OpenAI doesn't share a detailed validation of that claim. The post only says the milestone was met "according to our measurements." By March 2028, the company wants to build a full automated AI researcher. OpenAI says people still set research priorities, judge results, and decide on scaling, pauses, and deployment.

Agents now do three times the human workday

The usage numbers show how deeply coding agents have worked their way into daily research. According to the report, the median researcher at OpenAI burns more than $600 a day in inference at API prices, and the 90th percentile runs above $7,000. The token output of the median researcher has jumped 124-fold since December 2025, far faster than in other parts of the company. Since June, agent runtime has topped human working hours. As of mid-August, the research organization runs 3.1 agent workdays for every human workday.

OpenAI itself is careful with these numbers. Such metrics are "relatively easy to gather, but hard to interpret because their relationship to research progress is uncertain." The rise in experiments per researcher, which hit a record in August since tracking began in early 2025, also lines up with a big jump in compute capacity. Overall progress likely grows slower than these individual metrics, the report says, because the least automatable tasks become the bottleneck.