Epoch AI: coding-agent use by OpenAI researchers is doubling about every month
Partly confirmed
The takeaway
On Oct 5, 2026 Epoch AI analysed the charts in OpenAI’s September post “Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI”.
Status
- Claim
Partly confirmed
- Our reporting
- Medium confidence
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 13 October 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 Astra158 days after its cutoff
- Claude Opus 5.597 days after its cutoff
- Gemini 3.8 Flash188 days after its cutoff
- Grok 4.7127 days after its cutoff
None of these four assistants can know about it. The closest, Claude Opus 5.5, stops 97 days before it.
Key facts
- Data Insight by Yafah Edelman and Luke Emberson, Epoch AI, Oct 5, 2026; series read off the charts in OpenAI’s Sept 2026 post
- Median researcher: under $1/day in January 2026 → $601/day by mid-August; 90th percentile: $7,047/day in the week ending Aug 15
- Growth (preferred breakpoint model): median 1.8×/month (doubling every 34 days); 90th percentile 2.2×/month (27 days). Simple log-linear fits: 2.7× and 2.4× per month
- Annualized at the last weekly values (260 working days): about $160,000 per year for the median researcher, about $2 million for the 90th percentile
- If recent growth continued another year: about $185 million (median) and $2.3 billion (90th percentile) per researcher per year, hence ‘probably unsustainable’
- Scope: interactive usage by research employees only, priced at retail API prices of Sept 3, 2026, internal models mapped to the nearest production model; programmatic automations (e.g. Codex exec) excluded
- Caveats: ‘These data are self-reported by OpenAI and cannot be independently verified’; API prices are not OpenAI’s internal cost; percentiles are cross-sectional
What happened
OpenAI’s September post showed weekly charts of how much its researchers use coding agents. Epoch extracted the numbers and fitted growth curves. The typical researcher went from almost nothing in January to about $600 of API-priced usage a day in August, and heavy users to about $7,000 a day.
Why it matters
It is one of the few quantitative series on how fast a frontier lab is handing its own research work to agents. At these rates a single heavy user consumes about $2 million of API-priced inference a year, which helps explain the labs’ compute shortage. The numbers come from OpenAI’s own charts, and API list prices overstate the internal cost.
Sources
1 source from 1 site. Numbers match the chips in the text.
1 source: 1 primary
Primary
Changes
- Filed (Epoch’s page read directly)