OpenAI's researchers burned $7,000 a day on AI agents - now it's opening the floodgates

OpenAI shipped its Agents API in public beta, and the numbers published alongside it are the real signal. Its median researcher spends over $600 a day on inference at API prices, and the 90th percentile is above $7,000. By mid-August agents were completing 3.1 workdays of tasks for every human workday. If you are budgeting for long-running agents, assume inference dominates the bill and parallel subagents multiply it.