AI is moving from chat and web search to delegated work. Why it matters: 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. The big picture: 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 to 63% for organizations and 16.5% for individuals. - OpenAI's…
IT budgets are getting blown out as some companies increasingly spend more on AI than on employees' salaries. Why it matters: Maybe human labor will be more cost efficient after all. What they're saying: "For my team, the cost of compute is far beyond the costs of the employees," Bryan Catanzaro, vice president of applied deep learning at Nvidia, told Axios. - Uber's chief technology officer already blew through his full 2026 AI budget due to token costs, according to The Information. - Amos Bar-Joseph, CEO of Swan AI, bragged about his Anthropic bill in a viral LinkedIn post , saying "We're building the first autonomous business - scaling with intelligence, not headcount." Zoom out: Worldwide IT spending is expected to reach $6.31…
OpenAI is mobilizing consulting partners and touting its compute edge to claw back enterprise customers from Anthropic, as both labs barrel toward potential IPOs. Why it matters: The outcome of this fight could determine which company hits the public markets with momentum, and which has to explain to investors why it's losing ground. Driving the news: OpenAI is working to take market share from Anthropic's enterprise business. - The AI lab is engaging over half a dozen consulting partners to help enterprises deploy and scale Codex, OpenAI's coding tool. - Partners will get early access to AI tools in hopes that they can help enterprises "rethink their business processes in the age of AI in a different way," chief revenue officer Denise…
Dan Cox, Axios' chief technology officer, isn't a journalist, but his AI insights are vital to our readers. We want to show, not just tell, the impact AI is having on companies — in this case, Axios. - So we asked Dan to share what it's like to live the AI revolution. What his team is experiencing will soon hit lawyers, marketers, accountants, consultants ... and journalists. Here's what Dan told us: One of our best engineers recently completed a project similar to one he delivered a year ago. - Last year, it took three weeks. This past week, he used AI-based "agent teams" and completed the same amount of work in 37 minutes. Why it matters: This is the reality of the AI hype you read and hear about. Yes, coding is the first big place…