OpenAI's Codex active users grew more than 5X the first half of 2026, and the fastest growth came outside the original developer audience.

Usage exploded (per OpenAI's new research report):

- Longer tasks are becoming the new normal. By May 2026, 80.6% of sampled individual users had asked Codex to do work that would take a human more than 30 minutes. 70.2% had asked for tasks over 1 hour, and 25.6% had requested jobs above 8 hours.

- AI agents are not staying with developers. Engineers adopted Codex first, but Legal, Finance, Recruiting, and other non-technical teams quickly joined in. Within OpenAI, Codex now generates 99.8% of weekly output tokens.

- Non-developer adoption is rising fastest. Since August 2025, non-developer Codex usage grew about 137x among individual users and 189x among organizational users.

- Agents are expanding what workers can take on. Non-technical employees are using Codex for automation, data transformation, debugging, tooling, analysis, and technical tasks beyond their usual jobs.