OpenAI Says It Has Reached Its "Automated Research Intern" Goal
2026-09-06 ยท Frontier Models
OpenAI says it now has a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, and that it is making strong progress toward an automated AI researcher by March 2028.
In a September 6 post, "Research acceleration: The view inside OpenAI," the company said it had reached the goal it announced in 2025 of an automated research intern by September 2026. It defines the intern as a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days. OpenAI says its research organization now runs 3.1 agent-workdays of effort for every workday of human labor.
OpenAI states that it aims to build an automated AI researcher that works under human supervision, and it acknowledges that it does not yet know how to reach aligned, full recursive self-improvement safely.
For SIRDA, this is the trajectory at the center of its research focus, described by a frontier developer about its own work: AI systems doing a growing share of the research that produces the next systems.