OpenAI’s coding-agent usage is doubling monthly, with median researchers spending more than $600 a day

OpenAI’s use of coding agents has been doubling roughly every month since January 2026, according to Epoch AI. The bill is growing just as fast. An internal OpenAI report released on September 6, 2026, says the median researcher’s daily inference spend passed $600 by mid-August. In July, that figure was $162. What the report actually says The report is titled “Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI.” It describes how coding agents, Codex in particular, have changed the way the company’s researchers work. The basic shift is about delegation. Researchers are no longer asking agents for small code snippets. They are handing off longer, more complex tasks and running several agents at the same time. The spending numbers show how far that has gone. The median researcher crossed $600 per day in inference costs by mid-August, more than triple the $162 recorded in July. At the 90th percentile, the heaviest users topped $7,000 per day. The headline labor metric is just as striking. By mid-August, OpenAI’s research organization logged 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday, a ratio the report says it reached after June 2026. Output is up, and so are the guardrails The report links...