{"id":218523,"date":"2026-09-07T13:34:12","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/218523\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T13:34:12","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:34:12","slug":"openai-reveals-how-much-its-researchers-are-spending-on-ai-coding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/218523\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI Reveals How Much Its Researchers Are Spending on AI Coding"},"content":{"rendered":"

OpenAI has pulled back the curtain on how much its researchers spend on AI coding agents<\/a>.<\/p>\n

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 \u2014 the small chunks of text an AI model reads and produces \u2014 a day. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The company said it had reached the goal \u2014 set by CEO Sam Altman last year \u2014 of building an “automated research intern<\/a>” that can carry out tasks with human direction, and was on track to create a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028.<\/p>\n

Coding’s great reset <\/p>\n

The growing popularity and proficiency of coding agents have radically transformed software engineering<\/a> over the past year.<\/p>\n

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<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Want more Business Insider in your news feed?<\/p>\n

\n Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you\u2019re searching for what matters.\n <\/p>\n

It has also proved expensive for some companies. <\/p>\n

Earlier this year, companies encouraged employees to experiment with AI, including with leaderboards<\/a> to track the power users. That led some workers to engage in “tokenmaxxing,” the idea of using AI as much as possible, regardless of output. <\/p>\n

By the summer, however, the soaring cost of top AI models began to fuel concerns that tokenmaxxing was not increasing productivity enough to justify the spending.<\/p>\n

Companies including Meta and Amazon shut down internal token leaderboards<\/a>, with Amazon senior vice president Dave Treadwell warning staff not to “use AI just for the sake of using AI.”<\/p>\n

OpenAI has previously embraced high token usage. Altman said in June that the company’s highest token user burns through 100 billion tokens<\/a> a month. <\/p>\n

OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger<\/a>, who was hired by OpenAI in February, posted a screenshot of a $1.3 million monthly token bill in May \u2014 although like other employees, he doesn’t have to foot the bill. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"OpenAI has pulled back the curtain on how much its researchers spend on AI coding agents. In a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":218524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[150],"tags":[13994,594,26105,97755,1020,4863,97756,97754,97757,8245,613,23097,24151,581,97758,30525],"class_list":["post-218523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-sam-altman","tag-agent","tag-ai","tag-ai-coding","tag-ai-model-read","tag-company","tag-day","tag-high-token-usage","tag-high-level-task","tag-leaderboard","tag-month","tag-openai","tag-past-year","tag-researcher","tag-sam-altman","tag-small-chunk","tag-token"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/117230021209003768","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=218523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/218523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/218524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=218523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=218523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=218523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}