OpenAI says it has reached its 'automated research intern' goal

OpenAI said on September 6, 2026 that, by its own measurements, it has met a goal announced last fall of fielding an "automated research intern" by September of this year. In a blog post titled "Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI," the company defined the term as a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days. It reported that its research organization now uses 3.1 agent-workdays of effort for every workday of human labor. According to the post, researchers use coding agents to write code, run experiments and handle more complex tasks, often running several agents at once. People still set research priorities, judge which ideas and results to pursue, and decide whether to scale, pause or deploy systems. OpenAI said it is making strong progress toward an automated AI researcher by March 2028, which it describes as working under human supervision on deep learning and alignment, and it framed the work as progress toward recursive self-improvement. The company also argued for openness about the trend. "Transparency about specific risks, incidents and safeguards is necessary, but not sufficient. We believe the public also needs to understand how the most capable systems are developing, and how they are driving research progress, inside of frontier labs," it said. The figures are self-reported and have not been independently verified.