Research Automation

OpenAI Says AI Agents Now Do 3.1x More Research Work Than Humans

At the start of 2026, coding agents were still operating in the background of OpenAI’s research organization, helping researchers write code, troubleshoot experiments and move technical work forward. Within months, that balance shifted dramatically. Before June, total agent runtime was still below human labor. By mid-August, OpenAI says researchers were consuming 3.1 agent-workdays for every […]