OpenAI says it reached its goal of creating an automated research intern

The company hopes to have an even better “automated AI researcher” by March 2028.

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Just a day after acknowledging another incident of "misalignment," OpenAI announced that it has reached its goal of developing an "automated research intern." According to a post on its website, OpenAI says this research intern is "a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days." Beyond hitting its objective of creating an intern-level assistant powered by AI by September of this year, OpenAI added that it was "making strong progress toward creating an automated AI researcher by March of 2028."

"If it is done responsibly, we believe automated AI research will yield models that directly enhance human welfare and advance OpenAI's mission," the company wrote on its post.

OpenAI's CEO, Sam Altman, first announced the goal of developing this automated research intern during an October 2025 livestream. In the Q&A video, Altman said that, "we think it is plausible that by September of next year, we have an intern-level AI research assistant and that by March 2028, we have a legitimate AI researcher." OpenAI's CEO also added that these objectives have been the "core thrust of our research program."

OpenAI's announcement of its automated research intern comes a few days after it addressed an incident where its AI agents went rogue and hijacked a German coding forum. This incident comes on the heels of OpenAI dealing with the fallout of its AI models previously escaping a controlled testing environment and hacking into Hugging Face. OpenAI acknowledged the Hugging Face incident in its latest post and noted that it paused training on its latest models at the time, but didn't "halt all research."

As for OpenAI's competitors, Anthropic has called on the rapidly-growing industry to slow down the pace of development so that AI doesn't get to the point where it can develop its own successor. However, Anthropic's own AI models were also responsible for hacking into outside organizations after breaking out of a testing environment.