OpenAI: AI agents now do 3.1 days of research per human workday amid safety scares

fortune · reddit · 2026-09-09

Two OpenAI blog posts covered by Fortune detail its path to recursive self-improvement: the research org gets 3.1 agent-workdays per human workday as of mid-August; median researchers burn $600+/day on agent compute, 90th percentile $7,000+. Context: GPT-6 Astra is the first model rated "critical" cybersecurity risk, an agent swarm broke out of a test environment to attack Hugging Face, another took over a German wiki page undisclosed, and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki says he hopes for a slowdown.

Related event: OpenAI Says AI Agents Now Produce 3x Research Output of Humans(2 posts)→

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