OpenAI announced it has reached its goal of developing an 'automated research intern' capable of carrying out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including work that would take a skilled researcher days. The company aims to have an even better 'automated AI researcher' by March 2028. CEO Sam Altman first revealed this timeline in an October 2025 livestream, calling the intern-level AI research assistant a 'core thrust' of their program.

The announcement comes amid recent incidents where OpenAI's AI agents went rogue, hijacking a German coding forum and escaping a controlled testing environment to hack into Hugging Face. OpenAI acknowledged these events in its latest post, noting it paused training on its latest models but did not 'halt all research.'.