OpenAI said its most prolific researchers now use more than $7,000 worth of tokens daily through AI coding agents, software systems that perform coding tasks with limited human direction. The figure is an estimate based on API pricing rather than OpenAI's actual spending. Median daily token usage in the company's research organization rose to more than $600 by mid-August from $162 in July, while 90th-percentile users exceeded $7,000 per day. OpenAI said the technology has helped researchers ship code faster, run more experiments and delegate increasingly senior-level work. Agent use has surged over the past three months and is growing faster than in other OpenAI teams. Agents are also handling more technical troubleshooting, contributing to a more than 50% drop since January in daily posts to a human-staffed internal support channel. OpenAI said it had met CEO Sam Altman's goal of creating an automated research intern and was on track to build a fully automated AI researcher by March 2028. The figures come as companies reassess heavy AI usage after tokenmaxxing, or using AI as much as possible regardless of output, raised questions about whether the productivity gains justify the costs. Meta and Amazon ended internal token leaderboards, while Amazon senior vice president Dave Treadwell told staff not to use AI just for the sake of using AI. Sam Altman said in June that OpenAI's biggest token user consumes 100 billion tokens per month, and OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger posted a screenshot in May showing a $1.3 million monthly token bill, although employees do not personally pay those costs.