OpenAI internal Codex median output tokens grew 56x in Research since Nov 2025

[AINews] OpenAI reports median internal Codex output tokens grew 56x in Research, 32x in Customer Support, 27x in Engineering, and 13x in Legal since November 2025.

OpenAI's Economic Research team published internal usage data: from November 2025 to June 2026, median Codex output tokens for non-coding tasks jumped 56x in Research, 32x in Customer Support, 27x in Engineering, and 13x in Legal. Before August 2025, employees spent under 10% of tokens on Codex, so even with unlimited access they were underusing AI. The same day, Google shipped computer use as a built-in capability in Gemini 3.5 Flash across browser, desktop, and mobile, with explicit user confirmation and auto-stop safety controls. On the open-model side, Z.ai's GLM-5.2 hit 1595 on Code Arena Frontend, closing in on Claude Fable 5; Ornith-1.0 launched MIT-licensed coding models from 9B to 397B parameters, scoring 82.4 on SWE-Bench Verified. Agent infra is also shifting toward long-running workloads: Sail raised $80M for low-cost long-horizon inference sandboxes, and Hyperagent gives each agent its own persistent cloud machine.

Why it matters: OpenAI Economic Research's internal Codex usage data is one of the hardest signals lately on real AI adoption velocity. The department-level multipliers are specific and sourced, not PR fluff. Not scoring higher because this is a paid newsletter summary of the original report—...