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OpenAI's research-acceleration post shows daily coding-agent spend per researcher going from roughly $0 in February to about $600 in late August
OpenAI published "Research acceleration: the view inside OpenAI" on 2026-09-06 with a chart of daily agent spend per researcher: near $0 in February 2026, about $50 in April, about $150 in June, and roughly $600 by late August, a rough 4x jump in the June-to-August window with the steepest climb in late July. Simon Willison reads the framing as recursive self-improvement being OpenAI's new AGI target, and guesses the July inflection is when staff got internal access to what shipped as GPT-6 Astra. For builders the useful number is the absolute one: a frontier lab now considers $600/day/engineer in agent tokens a normal operating cost, which reframes what "expensive" means for your own agent budget.
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