{
  "id": 6803172,
  "title": "OpenAI’s researchers burned $7,000 a day on AI agents — now it’s opening the floodgates",
  "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/11/openais-researchers-burned-7-000-a-day-on-ai-agents-now-its-opening",
  "topic": "ai",
  "section": "AI",
  "published": "2026-09-11T21:27:42.000Z",
  "source": {
    "name": "The New Stack",
    "slug": "the-new-stack",
    "url": "https://thenewstack.io/openai-agents-api-compute/"
  },
  "original_language": "en",
  "account": "OpenAI launched its Agents API in public beta on Thursday, enabling developers to run agents unattended for extended periods without building their own infrastructure. This rollout coincided with OpenAI pausing new sign-ups for its $200-a-month Pro plan due to demand for GPT-6 Astra pushing capacity limits. While the two products are separate, the timing is notable as OpenAI is simplifying agents' long-term operation while simultaneously restricting access to its most resource-intensive consumer plan. Agent inference can become costly over time, with powered-by-the-API tasks potentially racking up significantly more usage than a regular API call, especially when agents operate in parallel. OpenAI's own research team logged 3.1 agent-workdays for every human workday by mid-August, with the 90th percentile of researchers spending over $7,000 daily on inference at API prices. This demonstrates how agents can generate far more inference than a single human, raising concerns about compute demand. OpenAI's approach to agent context compaction reduces friction for developers by automatically handling earlier context compression, but also means work can continue even when the context window fills up.",
  "summary": "OpenAI rolled out its Agents API in public beta Thursday, opening the backend behind Codex to developers looking to run The post OpenAI’s researchers burned $7,000 a day on AI agents — now it’s opening the floodgates appeared first on The New Stack .",
  "key_points": [
    "OpenAI's Agents API launched in public beta on Thursday.",
    "Researchers burned $7,000 a day on agent inference by mid-August.",
    "Pro plan sign-ups paused due to capacity limits from GPT-6 Astra."
  ],
  "editors_take": null,
  "illustration": null,
  "coverage": {
    "outlets": 3,
    "also_reported_by": [
      {
        "outlet": "Techmeme",
        "title": "Researchers: OpenAI agents attacked Ruby package manager RubyGems in May; OpenAI says its agents used RubyGems to access the internet to do \"benign tasks\" (Robert McMillan/Wall Street Journal)",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/11/researchers-openai-agents-attacked-ruby-package-manager-rubygems-in",
        "published": "2026-09-11T22:45:41.000Z"
      },
      {
        "outlet": "SiliconANGLE",
        "title": "Researchers link another hacking campaign to OpenAI agents",
        "url": "https://urgent.news/2026/09/12/researchers-link-another-hacking-campaign-to-openai-agents",
        "published": "2026-09-12T01:25:10.000Z"
      }
    ]
  },
  "ai_generated": true,
  "disclaimer": "Summaries, key points and the editor’s take are written by software from other outlets’ reporting and may contain errors — always check the linked original."
}