OpenAI reports 97.9% employee adoption of Codex as agentic AI usage surges across departments

OpenAI says 97.9 percent of its employees are now using agents

A company can learn a lot about the market by looking at its own employees. OpenAI says that its team members are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction, a trend also detected (though less pronounced) among external organizations and users. Instead of one-off ChatGPT prompts, workers are asking Codex agents to tackle multi-step tasks that take long periods of time. And those doing so are increasingly non-developers. OpenAI insists that its findings have implications for other companies, labor researchers, and policymakers, not the least of which would be a brighter revenue picture for OpenAI. Longer running tasks consume more tokens, and to the extent those can be billed, that should help diminish hundreds of billions in debt obligations. "We find that agentic AI usage is growing rapidly: the number of active users has grown more than fivefold in the first half of 2026, with the most rapid increase occurring outside the initial audience of software developers," said company researchers and academics in a paper [PDF] titled, "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether it incentivizes or encourages employees to use its AI tools - through internal communiques, token allocations, token use leaderboards, or tying tool usage to performance metrics. But we'll take it on faith that when there's enough Kool-Aid on-premises, employees may just develop a taste for it regardless of whether their jobs depend on Kool-Aid consumption. "Through August 2025, the average OpenAI worker spent less than 10 percent of their tokens on Codex," the biz explained in a blog post accompanying its paper (that suggests employee token allocations). "Now, every department, including non-technical departments such as Legal and Recruiting, uses Codex as their primary AI tool for work." Within OpenAI, 97.9 percent of employees are now using Codex, up from around 40 percent in August 2025. External organizations have also seen a usage uptick, to 17.3 percent presently. With individuals, Codex isn't much to speak of - about 0.7 percent. The thing about Codex is that, as an agent, it can operate for long periods of time. "Since the start of the year, the share of individual Codex users who submit at least one request for a task estimated to require more than eight hours for an experienced human to complete has increased nearly tenfold," the paper says. We note that comparing the time a human might take for a task (as estimated by an LLM-as-judge) to the time an AI model takes is only part of the picture if the workflow isn't entirely automated. Generating code at, say, 10x the rate a person might manage may expand the time required for code verification and deployment. OpenAI also points out that, since August 2025, non-developer usage of Codex has risen 137x for individuals, 189x for organizational users, and 12x within OpenAI. The company concedes that technical usage remains the dominant mode, but insists that adoption by non-devs shows how a broader set of knowledge workers can take on coding or technical tasks, such as automation, data transformation, and data analysis. "In June 2026, the median OpenAI employee in a legal role generated 13 times more monthly output tokens across Codex and ChatGPT than they did in November 2025," the paper says. Given that the number of US federal lawsuits filed against OpenAI and associated entities only grew about 11 percent (35 to 39) between the last six months of 2025 and the first six months of 2026, it looks like OpenAI's legal team, with its 13x token surge, is making the company's case for the productivity benefits of AI tools. ®

OpenAI says employees moving beyond chat to agents

A company can learn a lot about the market by looking at its own employees. OpenAI says that its team members are switching from chatbots to agents as their primary form of AI interaction, a trend also detected (though less pronounced) among external organizations and users. Instead of one-off ChatGPT prompts, workers are asking Codex agents to tackle multi-step tasks that take long periods of time. And those doing so are increasingly non-developers. OpenAI insists that its findings have implications for other companies, labor researchers, and policymakers, not the least of which would be a brighter revenue picture for OpenAI. Longer running tasks consume more tokens, and to the extent those can be billed, that should help diminish hundreds of billions in debt obligations. "We find that agentic AI usage is growing rapidly: the number of active users has grown more than fivefold in the first half of 2026, with the most rapid increase occurring outside the initial audience of software developers," said company researchers and academics in a paper [PDF] titled, "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request to clarify whether it incentivizes or encourages employees to use its AI tools - through internal communiques, token allocations, token use leaderboards, or tying tool usage to performance metrics. But we'll take it on faith that when there's enough Kool-Aid on-premises, employees may just develop a taste for it regardless of whether their jobs depend on Kool-Aid consumption. "Through August 2025, the average OpenAI worker spent less than 10 percent of their tokens on Codex," the biz explained in a blog post accompanying its paper (that suggests employee token allocations). "Now, every department, including non-technical departments such as Legal and Recruiting, uses Codex as their primary AI tool for work." Within OpenAI, 97.9 percent of employees are now using Codex, up from around 40 percent in August 2025. External organizations have also seen a usage uptick, to 17.3 percent presently. With individuals, Codex isn't much to speak of - about 0.7 percent. The thing about Codex is that, as an agent, it can operate for long periods of time. "Since the start of the year, the share of individual Codex users who submit at least one request for a task estimated to require more than eight hours for an experienced human to complete has increased nearly tenfold," the paper says. We note that comparing the time a human might take for a task (as estimated by an LLM-as-judge) to the time an AI model takes is only part of the picture if the workflow isn't entirely automated. Generating code at, say, 10x the rate a person might manage may expand the time required for code verification and deployment. OpenAI also points out that, since August 2025, non-developer usage of Codex has risen 137x for individuals, 189x for organizational users, and 12x within OpenAI. The company concedes that technical usage remains the dominant mode, but insists that adoption by non-devs shows how a broader set of knowledge workers can take on coding or technical tasks, such as automation, data transformation, and data analysis. "In June 2026, the median OpenAI employee in a legal role generated 13 times more monthly output tokens across Codex and ChatGPT than they did in November 2025," the paper says. Given that the number of US federal lawsuits filed against OpenAI and associated entities only grew about 11 percent (35 to 39) between the last six months of 2025 and the first six months of 2026, it looks like OpenAI's legal team, with its 13x token surge, is making the company's case for the productivity benefits of AI tools. ®

OpenAI says 98% of its employees now use Codex agents, but all the data is self-reported

OpenAI says 98% of employees now use Codex agents and non-dev usage grew 137x, but all metrics are self-reported by the company that sells the product. Nearly 98 percent of OpenAI's employees now use Codex, the company's AI coding agent, up from roughly 40 percent in August 2025, according to a paper the company published on Wednesday titled "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex." The paper describes a fundamental change in how the company's own workforce interacts with AI, moving from conversational chatbot use to autonomous agents that execute multi-step tasks. Every statistic in the paper, however, comes from OpenAI itself, a company with a direct financial incentive to promote the product it is measuring. The headline numbers are striking. Active Codex users grew fivefold in the first half of 2026, and requests for tasks estimated to take eight or more hours increased nearly tenfold. OpenAI's legal team generated 13 times more tokens in June than in November 2025, a figure the company presents as evidence that agents are penetrating departments far beyond engineering. The growth among non-developers is where OpenAI's narrative centres. Individual non-developer usage of Codex grew 137 times since August 2025, organisational non-developer usage grew 189 times, and internal non-developer adoption grew twelvefold. The company expanded Codex earlier this month with enterprise plugins connecting 62 business applications, and non-developers now make up roughly 20 percent of the platform's five million weekly users, adopting three times faster than engineers. The paper frames this as evidence of a market-wide transition from chatbots to agents. OpenAI argues that the pattern visible inside its own company, where every department from legal to recruiting now treats Codex as a primary tool, previews how enterprise AI adoption will unfold broadly. The company points to external data showing Codex usage among organisations at roughly 17 percent and among individuals at under one percent, suggesting significant room for growth. But the gap between internal and external adoption also raises questions about how representative OpenAI's own workforce is. The paper does not address whether the company incentivises or encourages employees to use Codex, a relevant omission given that nearly universal adoption inside a company selling the product is not the same as organic demand. No independent third party has verified any of the usage figures. The self-reporting problem extends to the productivity claims, where OpenAI says longer task requests and higher token generation prove that agents are handling more complex work. As The Register noted, faster code generation does not automatically translate into proportional productivity gains, because verification, testing, and deployment time may expand to absorb the speed improvement. The paper does not present data on whether the shift to agents has measurably improved output quality or reduced total time to completion. The broader context is a race among AI companies to prove that agents, not chatbots, represent the next phase of the market. OpenAI merged ChatGPT and Codex under Greg Brockman in May, consolidating its product strategy around a single agentic platform ahead of a potential Q4 IPO. Anthropic's Claude Code and Google's Gemini are pursuing similar agentic strategies, making the competitive pressure to show adoption growth intense. Meta's internal experience offers a parallel data point. The company introduced a "Claudeonomics" leaderboard in April that tracks token consumption by team, turning AI usage into a visible performance metric. That approach, like OpenAI's paper, measures input volume rather than output value, a distinction that matters when the companies reporting the numbers are also the ones selling the tools. The paper is most useful as a signal of where OpenAI believes the market is heading, and where it wants investors to believe the market is heading before its IPO. The shift from chatbot queries to autonomous agent tasks is real and visible across the industry. Whether it is happening at the pace and scale that OpenAI's self-reported data suggests is a question that only independent measurement will answer.

Exclusive: Codex agents are inching into the mainstream

Why it matters: The frontier AI labs have spent years promising that effective AI agents will act as our minions in the workplace and at home and that might soon be a reality. The big picture: Use of Codex -- OpenAI's agentic coding and work platform -- is accelerating, according to a new report from OpenAI, Columbia, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers separate Codex users into three categories: OpenAI employees, outside organizations and individual users. Then they measured usage of Codex versus ChatGPT, by tokens. * 99.8% of OpenAI employees' output tokens were produced with Codex, compared to 63% for organizations and 16.5% for individuals. * OpenAI's own Codex use is meant to represent how users might turn to agents when cost, access, training and buy-in are mostly removed. * Among active users of ChatGPT and Codex at organizations outside OpenAI, just above 0% used Codex in August 2025. That share is now around 17%. Between the lines: The number of individuals using Codex is still small, but those who do use it, use it a lot, per the report, shared first with Axios. By the numbers: In a sample of individual Codex users, 80.6% made at least one Codex request estimated to represent more than 30 minutes of work by an "experienced human." * 70.2% of Codex users made at least one request estimated to save more than an hour of human work. * 25.6% had delegated work estimated to take more than eight hours for a human to complete. The fine print: The report says the thresholds are model-estimated and based on a 0.1% random sample of individual users who opted to allow queries for training. Zoom in: Non-developers are the fastest-growing user group, even though software work is still the core use case for Codex. Catch up quick: The shift to agentic work began in earnest at the beginning of 2026. * That's when normal people began to allow Codex, OpenClaw, and Anthropic's Claude Code to interact with their desktops, manage calendars, read and write files, control web browsers, and execute scripts. My thought bubble: As a journalist who has spent years covering cybersecurity -- and whose coding knowledge tops out at early-2000s HTML -- I was wary of giving agents access to my files, browser and apps. * But over the last month, I've started using Codex and Claude Code for a lot of the work and life admin I used to handle manually. * My agents fill out expense reports, triage email, make hair appointments and report packages stolen from my apartment lobby. Yes, this does happen often enough in San Francisco that I have saved time automating the task. What they're saying: "Agents are reducing what I'd call the psychological cost of action," workplace culture expert Jessica Kriegel tells Axios. * They "make unfamiliar work feel more approachable, which means I start sooner, experiment more, and spend less energy worrying about what I don't know." Yes, but: Most AI users are still chatting with bots and not managing an army of agents.

Codex use is spreading into knowledge work, OpenAI says

OpenAI published a research paper detailing the evolution of its Codex platform into the primary AI tool within the company. The paper, titled "The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex," highlights that as of June 11, 2026, Codex accounts for 99.8% of output tokens generated across both Codex and ChatGPT among OpenAI employees. All departments within OpenAI, including Legal, Finance, and Recruiting, now utilize Codex for work-related tasks. Non-technical departments reached majority Codex usage by April 2026, following earlier adoption by engineering teams. The median employee in a legal role now generates 13 times more monthly output tokens compared to November 2025, while the median researcher's output has increased over 50 times in the same period. Growth among non-developer users of Codex has surged, rising 137 times among individual users and 189 times among organizational users since August 2025. Currently, 17.3% of organizational account users outside OpenAI have adopted Codex, contrasting with fewer than 1% of individual users. The report indicates a significant shift from conversational AI, where users solicit advice, toward agentic AI, where users assign Codex multi-step tasks. "Users are asking Codex to do work, not only to provide advice or information," the paper states. OpenAI has cautioned that its internal data may not portray typical trends of enterprise adoption, citing favorable conditions like high organizational commitment and unrestricted usage. Among external organizational users, Codex represents 63.3% of output tokens, while its adoption remains at 16.5% among individual users. The complexity of tasks submitted to Codex is increasing, with 25.6% of individual users now submitting requests estimated to require over eight hours of human work, compared to just 2.1% in December 2025. Codex boasts over 5 million weekly active users, a more than sixfold increase since February.

OpenAI says AI agents are already transforming how its employees work

"For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens," OpenAI said. OpenAI says AI agents are already changing how its employees work. The company says Codex is now one of the main AI tools used across every department. Employees are relying on them to complete longer and more complex tasks. OpenAI says that among daily active users at the company, the heaviest users ask Codex to run many hours of agent work in a single day. In a post on X, OpenAI said, "Work at OpenAI is being transformed by agents, in every department." It added that people are using Codex for "more complex, longer-running, and increasingly cross-functional" work. "Our internal usage offers an early look at how agentic tools may reshape work as they become more capable and broadly available." Also read: Like Anthropic, OpenAI may restrict GPT 5.6 access during initial rollout: Here is why In a blog post, OpenAI explained that AI agents are different from chatbots. A chatbot usually answers one question at a time. An AI agent can work on a task for minutes or even hours. It can use different tools, solve problems step by step, and keep working without constant human input. OpenAI said ChatGPT was the main AI tool used by employees after Codex was launched. That changed as Codex improved. Today, it is the primary AI tool across every team. "For the average OpenAI worker, Codex usage now accounts for more than 85% of output tokens," the AI company said. By May 2026, around 81 per cent of sampled individual users had asked Codex to complete at least one task that would take a person over 30 minutes. Around 70 per cent gave it work that would take over an hour. Around 26 per cent assigned tasks that could take more than eight hours. Also read: Google reportedly postpones Gemini 3.5 Pro launch, here is why The company also saw strong growth among non-developers. Employees in Legal, Finance and Recruiting now use Codex regularly. Many use it for coding, automation, data analysis, debugging, and other technical work. "Our results demonstrate what unfolds when people have broad, low-friction access to capable agentic tools: as the tools improve, people use them for longer, more complex, and more cross-functional work. As time goes on, this is likely to be what the future of work looks like," OpenAI said.