OpenAI Report: Codex Use at Outside Organizations Reaches 17 Percent

Use of OpenAI's Codex agentic coding and work platform has accelerated since the start of 2026, according to a report from OpenAI, Columbia, Duke and the University of Pennsylvania shared first with Axios. Among active ChatGPT and Codex users at organizations outside OpenAI, the share using Codex rose from just above 0 percent in August 2025 to approximately 17 percent.

OpenAI employees produced 99.8 percent of their output tokens with Codex, while organizations reached 63 percent and individual users reached 16.5 percent.

Seventy point two percent of Codex users made at least one request estimated to save more than an hour of human work. Twenty five point six percent delegated work estimated to take more than eight hours for a human to complete. The thresholds are model-estimated and based on a 0.1 percent random sample of individual users who opted to allow queries for training.

Non-developers form the fastest-growing user group, though software work remains the core use case. The shift began in earnest at the beginning of 2026, when users began allowing Codex, OpenClaw and Anthropic's Claude Code to interact with desktops, manage calendars, read and write files, control web browsers and execute scripts.

Fewer than 1 percent of active consumers on Go, Free, Pro and Plus plans used Codex in the last 28 days, Axios reported.