OpenAI Researchers Reportedly Burn Over $7,000 in Tokens Daily

Leaked data on AI usage costs among OpenAI's internal researchers has gone viral: researchers at the 90th percentile consume over $7,000 worth of tokens per day, an annualized cost exceeding a new researcher's salary. Meanwhile, spending on coding agents has surged from nearly zero to hundreds of dollars a day over the past few months, laying bare how heavily frontier labs rely on AI-assisted research—and raising questions about return on investment.

Confirmed

• OpenAI researcher Kevin Liu (@kliu128) and his team published data showing how models accelerate internal research at OpenAI: many researchers now spend more on Codex than it would cost to hire a human researcher, averaging around $7,000 per day in token costs.
• OpenAI says its 90th-percentile researchers now consume more than $7,000 worth of tokens daily.
• As of August 15, the median OpenAI researcher reportedly spends $601.25 per day on coding agents.
• A widely shared tweet noted that in February the median OpenAI researcher spent $0 per day on coding agents, in stark contrast to OpenAI's earlier marketing of its models' coding capabilities.

Unconfirmed

• Both the $601.25/day coding agent figure and the $0 figure from February come from leaks and have not been officially confirmed by OpenAI.
• There is no public data on the actual research output gains corresponding to these expenditures.

Why it matters

• The numbers illustrate the sheer compute intensity of AI-assisted research inside frontier labs, where top researchers' workflows already depend heavily on massive model usage.
• gerardsans questioned the ROI of "burning $7,000 a day," worrying such spending could drag down the US economy, citing Uber's earlier headline-making AI overspend and subsequent cutbacks.
• It also offers a rare internal reference point for how quickly agent subscriptions and quotas inflate enterprise costs, helping outsiders gauge the business value of AI tools.

2026-09-06 ~ 2026-09-07 · 5 related posts

• [source] Median OpenAI researcher reportedly spends $601.25/day on coding agents — scaling01 · 2026-09-06
• [source] OpenAI says its 90th-percentile researchers burn over $7,000 in tokens per day — MTSlive · 2026-09-07
• [source] OpenAI researchers now spend more on Codex than hiring a human researcher — willdepue · 2026-09-07
• Median OpenAI researcher spent $0/day on coding agents in February, post reveals — zacharynado · 2026-09-07
• $7,000/day token use draws ROI doubts as Uber's AI overspending comes to mind — gerardsans · 2026-09-07