AI agents are here for real this time

AI is moving from chat and web search to delegated work. The frontier AI labs have spent years promising that effective AI agents will act as our minions in the workplace and at home, and that might soon be a reality. Use of Codex—OpenAI's agentic coding and work platform—is accelerating, according to a new report from OpenAI, Columbia, Duke, and the University of Pennsylvania. The researchers separate Codex users into three categories: OpenAI employees, outside organizations, and individual users. Then they measured usage of Codex versus ChatGPT, by tokens.

• 99.8% of OpenAI employees' output tokens were produced with Codex, compared with 63% for organizations and 16.5% for individuals.
• OpenAI's own Codex use is meant to represent how users might turn to agents when cost, access, training and buy-in are mostly removed.
• Among active users of ChatGPT and Codex at organizations outside OpenAI, just above 0% used Codex in August 2025. That share is now around 17%.

The number of individuals using Codex is still small, but those who use it use it a lot, per the report.