OpenAI Reveals How Much Its Researchers Are Spending on AI Coding - Business Insider

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously said the company's top token user burns through 100 billion a month. Sean Rayford/Getty Images 2026-09-07T11:32:34.175Z Read in app Save Saved Listen to this story This story is available exclusively to Business Insider subscribers. Become an Insider and start reading now. Have an account? Log in . OpenAI has pulled back the curtain on how much its researchers spend on AI coding agents . 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 — the small chunks of text an AI model reads and produces — a day. 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. 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. 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. 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. The company said it had reached the goal — set by CEO Sam Altman last year — of building an " automated research intern " that can carry out tasks with human direction, and was on track to create a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. Coding's great reset The growing popularity and proficiency of coding agents have radically transformed software engineering over the past year. 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 . Explore BI Games Take a smarter break in your day - and see how far you get. Play now Want more Business Insider in your news feed? Add BI in Google so our reporting is easier to find when you’re searching for what matters. Add to Preferred Sources It has also proved expensive for some companies. Earlier this year, companies encouraged employees to experiment with AI, including with leaderboards 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. 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. Companies including Meta and Amazon shut down internal token leaderboards , with Amazon senior vice president Dave Treadwell warning staff not to "use AI just for the sake of using AI." OpenAI has previously embraced high token usage. Altman said in June that the company's highest token user burns through 100 billion tokens a month. OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger , who was hired by OpenAI in February, posted a screenshot of a $1.3 million monthly token bill in May — although like other employees, he doesn't have to foot the bill.