OpenAI runs 3.1 agent workdays for every human workday in research

OpenAI has published internal data on how heavily its own research organization uses AI agents, and says it has reached the automated research intern goal it announced last fall. Agent runtime has exceeded human working hours since June, and by mid-August the research group was running 3.1 agent workdays for every human workday. The median researcher spends more than $600 a day on inference at API prices, and the 90th percentile more than $7,000. Tasks under fifteen minutes finished without any human step-in 86 percent of the time, while more than half of successful four-to-eight-hour tasks needed at least one intervention. All figures come from inside the company, with no independent review reported. Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote the same day that chain-of-thought monitoring is losing reliability.