As model capabilities improve, research inside frontier labs appears to be accelerating. OpenAI just gave us a peek behind the curtain. At the start of the year, the median OpenAI researcher wasn’t using coding agents. Today, that researcher spends more than $600 per day on tokens—roughly $12,000 per month. The top 10% consume an order of magnitude more: $7,000+ per day, or roughly $140,000 per month. Token consumption is growing faster in Research than in any other department, while the share of researchers using four or more concurrent agents has more than doubled. Lines of code shipped are up more than 6× versus the 2025 average, and average experiments per researcher have roughly doubled. Quality is improving, too. OpenAI measured agentic task success rates across different time horizons and found improvement since the beginning of the year.