Data◆Article
Among OpenAI's active internal Codex users, median combined output-token usage grew sharply across departments over six months: Research rose 56x, Customer Support 32x, Engineering 27x, and Legal 13x by June 2026 versus November 2025.
OpenAI's internal economic research shows a massive surge in Codex output-token usage across departments over six months, with Research seeing the largest jump at 56x. ✦ AI generated
OpenAI Economic Research · Latent Space · 2026-06-26 · original ↗
Research saw the biggest jump: by June 2026, median use was 56 times higher than in November 2025. Customer Support rose 32 times and Engineering rose 27 times, while Legal grew more gradually but still reached 13 times its November level.
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- ·Median output-token usage surged over six months
- ·Research usage grew fastest, reaching 56x by June 2026
- ·Customer Support rose 32x; Engineering rose 27x
- ·Legal grew more gradually, still reaching 13x
- ·Research led all departments at 56x growth
- ·Legal was slowest but still grew 13x
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supports → Even though OpenAI employees have always had unlimited access to internal AI tools, they were still grossly underusing AI right up until late 2025, which sets an important baseline against 'tokenmaxxing' concerns.AI News (editorial) · Latent Spacesupports → The AI models released in November 2025 made agentic coding genuinely useful for the first time, and six months on, companies are now spending real money on the technology.Simon Willison · The Pragmatic Engineersupports → Developers using AI coding harnesses now produce roughly 2.5 times as much code as they did 18 months ago.Gergely Orosz · The Pragmatic Engineerextends → Developers using AI coding harnesses now produce roughly 2.5 times as much code as they did 18 months ago.Gergely Orosz · The Pragmatic Engineer