OpenAI hits automated research intern goal
OpenAI said on September 6, 2026 that, by its own measurements, it has reached the goal announced last fall of an automated research intern by September: a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including work that would take a skilled researcher a few days, and that it is making strong progress toward an automated AI researcher by March 2028. The research publication reports coding agents reshaping researchers’ days—by mid-August the median researcher used more than $600/day of inference at API prices, the 90th percentile more than $7,000/day, and about 3.1 agent-workdays of effort per human workday—while stressing humans still set priorities and that full aligned recursive self-improvement is not yet known to be safe. This is an OpenAI transparency snapshot on research acceleration and RSI progress, not a ChatGPT product launch and not the GPT-6 Astra release.