OpenAI reveals how much its researchers are spending on AI coding

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OpenAI has pulled back the curtain on how much its researchers spend on AI coding agents.

In a blog post on Sunday, the startup said the most prolific users of AI coding agents among its researchers now consume more than $7,000 worth of tokens — the small chunks of text an AI model reads and produces — a day.

The technology has substantially changed the way OpenAI's researchers work over the past year, the company said, with staff shipping code faster, performing more experiments, and delegating increasingly high-level tasks to coding agents.

OpenAI said that AI coding agent usage among its researchers has skyrocketed over the past three months and is outpacing growth among other OpenAI teams.

As of mid-August, the median researcher at the company's research organization was using more than $600 in tokens per day, up from $162 in July, per OpenAI data, with 90th-percentile users burning through over $7,000 per day. The figures are based on inference at API prices, meaning they're estimates of what they would cost rather than the dollar amount OpenAI actually paid.

OpenAI also said that its agents were increasingly being used to troubleshoot technical issues, so much so that the number of daily posts in a human-staffed internal technical support channel dropped by more than half since January.

The company said it had reached the goal — set by CEO Sam Altman last year — of building an "automated research intern" that can carry out tasks with human direction, and was on track to create a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028.

The growing popularity and proficiency of coding agents have radically transformed software engineering over the past year.

Many developers now delegate their coding tasks to AI agents and review their outputs. Some say this makes them more productive, but others are less on board.