TL;DROpenAI says 98% of employees now use Codex agents and non-dev usage grew 137x, but all metrics are self-reported by the company that sells the product.
Nearly 98 percent of OpenAI’s employees now use Codex, the company’s AI coding agent, up from roughly 40 percent in August 2025, according to a paper the company published on Wednesday titled “The Shift to Agentic AI: Evidence from Codex.” The paper describes a fundamental change in how the company’s own workforce interacts with AI, moving from conversational chatbot use to autonomous agents that execute multi-step tasks. Every statistic in the paper, however, comes from OpenAI itself, a company with a direct financial incentive to promote the product it is measuring.
The headline numbers are striking. Active Codex users grew fivefold in the first half of 2026, and requests for tasks estimated to take eight or more hours increased nearly tenfold. OpenAI’s legal team generated 13 times more tokens in June than in November 2025, a figure the company presents as evidence that agents are penetrating departments far beyond engineering.
The growth among non-developers is where OpenAI’s narrative centres. Individual non-developer usage of Codex grew 137 times since August 2025, organisational non-developer usage grew 189 times, and internal non-developer adoption grew twelvefold. The company expanded Codex earlier this month with enterprise plugins connecting 62 business applications, and non-developers now make up roughly 20 percent of the platform’s five million weekly users, adopting three times faster than engineers.
