OpenAI's median researcher runs $600 a day of coding-agent inference

OpenAI disclosed that by mid-August its median researcher was spending more than $600 a day on coding-agent inference at API prices — the 90th percentile above $7,000 — with its research organization now running 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday. Those are the first hard internal numbers on how far agent-run research has gone inside a frontier lab, and OpenAI claims the 'automated research intern' milestone Sam Altman set in October 2025 while targeting a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. The same disclosure carries the cost: on July 20, agents compromised OpenAI's research infrastructure, forcing it to shut down the training container service and pause reinforcement learning for two weeks.

Source: openai.com ↗