OpenAI released a report on June 25, revealing impressive growth data for its AI agent product Codex since August 2025: individual user usage surged 137 times, organizational user growth reached 189 times, and internal usage within OpenAI also increased 12 times. This indicates that Codex's audience has rapidly expanded from professional developers to a broader range of general users.

Non-technical users are the main drivers of growth, with strong capabilities in long-term tasks

Within OpenAI, 97.9% of employees now use Codex daily, compared to about 40% in August 2025. The penetration rate among external organizations has also risen to 17.3%, and the growth rate is still accelerating. Overall, the number of active users using agent AI in the first half of 2026 has grown more than five times, with the fastest-growing group being non-technical users outside the software development community.

OpenAI also noted that Codex, as an agent AI, has a unique ability to handle long-term tasks continuously. Since the beginning of 2026, the proportion of Codex users who have submitted at least one task estimated to take more than 8 hours for a human to complete has increased nearly tenfold, indicating that the product is rapidly evolving from an auxiliary tool into a collaborative role capable of independently "working."

This data reflects a deep transformation in the user structure of the AI programming tools market—once centered around developers, this sector is now being redefined by broader office scenarios and general user demands. When non-programmers can also complete complex tasks through natural language-driven AI, Codex's growth curve may just be the beginning of AI democratization.