OpenAI reaches automated research intern goal, targets AI researcher by 2028

OpenAI announced it has reached its 'automated research intern' milestone, a human-supervised AI system capable of completing well-defined research tasks that would take a skilled human researcher several days. The goal was announced last fall with a September target. OpenAI is targeting a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. As of mid-August, the research organization runs 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday, a measure of runtime rather than equivalent productivity. Engineers are changing approximately 7x more code per contributor than pre-2025 baselines. The share of researchers running 4 or more concurrent agent workflows grew from roughly one-third in April to roughly three-quarters by mid-August. The median researcher uses more than $600 per day of inference at API prices; the 90th percentile uses more than $7,000 per day. OpenAI published the internal metrics and stated that companies should be legally required to report recursive self-improvement progress publicly.