{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-10-13T07:38:00+02:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-05-epoch-openai-coding-agent-use-doubling-monthly/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-05-epoch-openai-coding-agent-use-doubling-monthly/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"Adam Bicz","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2026-10-05-epoch-openai-coding-agent-use-doubling-monthly","date":"2026-10-05","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Epoch AI: coding-agent use by OpenAI researchers is doubling about every month","deck":null,"takeaway":"On Oct 5, 2026 Epoch AI analysed the charts in OpenAI's September post \"Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI\".","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":3,"confidence":"medium","status":{"key":"partly","labels":["Partly confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Epoch AI: Coding-agent use at OpenAI is doubling roughly every month (Oct 5, 2026)","url":"https://epoch.ai/data-insights/openai-coding-agent-spending","type":"official","group":"primary","domain":"epoch.ai"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-10-13","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Epoch AI","OpenAI"],"title":"Epoch AI: coding-agent use by OpenAI researchers is doubling about every month (median $601 a day by mid-August)","summary":"On Oct 5, 2026 Epoch AI analysed the charts in OpenAI's September post \"Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI\". Valued at API list prices, the median OpenAI researcher's daily coding-agent usage rose from under $1 in January 2026 to $601 by mid-August, and the 90th percentile to over $7,000 a day. Recent growth is 1.8× per month for the median (doubling every 34 days) and 2.2× for the 90th percentile (27 days). Epoch calls the pace \"probably unsustainable\"; the data are OpenAI's own and unverified.","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"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["coding-agents","ai-rd-automation","compute","openai","codex","epoch-ai","recursive-self-improvement"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nOpenAI's September post showed weekly charts of how much its researchers use coding agents. Epoch extracted the numbers and fitted\ngrowth curves. The typical researcher went from almost nothing in January to about $600 of API-priced usage a day in August, and\nheavy users to about $7,000 a day.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nIt 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\nsingle heavy user consumes about $2 million of API-priced inference a year, which helps explain the labs' compute shortage. The\nnumbers come from OpenAI's own charts, and API list prices overstate the internal cost.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2026-10-07-epoch-innovationeval-ai-rd-automation","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-07-epoch-innovationeval-ai-rd-automation/","date":"2026-10-07","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Epoch AI's InnovationEval","deck":"Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol fail to reinvent a recent ML method and overstate their own results","takeaway":"Labs say automated AI research is close (OpenAI's stated goal is an automated researcher by March 2028).","category":"benchmark","category_label":"Benchmarks","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":6,"official":4,"filed":"2026-10-12","updated":"2026-10-12","orgs":["Epoch AI","OpenAI","Anthropic"]},{"id":"2026-10-02-epoch-ai-agent-population-estimate","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-10-02-epoch-ai-agent-population-estimate/","date":"2026-10-02","date_precision":"day","short_title":"Epoch AI: chips shipped through 2027 could run 33–171 million frontier-model agents at once","deck":null,"takeaway":"On Oct 2, 2026 Epoch AI's Jason Li estimated how many AI agents the world's AI hardware could run.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":3,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":1,"official":1,"filed":"2026-10-13","updated":"2026-10-13","orgs":["Epoch AI"]},{"id":"2026-09-06-openai-automated-research-intern","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-06-openai-automated-research-intern/","date":"2026-09-06","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI says it has reached its \"automated AI research intern\" milestone","deck":null,"takeaway":"It is the first time a frontier lab publicly claimed to have hit a named step on its own road toward automated AI research, which is the core mechanism of recursive self-improvement.","category":"agents","category_label":"Agents","importance":4,"confidence":"medium","status":{"key":"partly","labels":["Partly confirmed"]},"sources":7,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-10-01","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-10-13","type":"filed","text":"Created (Epoch's page read directly)"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-10-13","run":null,"sources_read":"Epoch's page read directly","updated":"2026-10-13","human_review":null,"version":null},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":158,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":97,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"gemini-3-8-flash","name":"Gemini 3.8 Flash","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":188,"in_training_data":false},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":127,"in_training_data":false}],"short_url":null}