Even interns are not safe from AI? OpenAI says it has built an automated research intern
Follow UsMany people are worried that AI could take away their jobs. But it looks like even interns are not safe.
OpenAI has announced that it has reached a major goal of building an "automated research intern."
OpenAI described the AI intern as "a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction."
Many people are worried that AI could take away their jobs. But it looks like even interns are not safe. OpenAI has announced that it has reached a major goal of building an “automated research intern” that can carry out research tasks under human direction. The company says the AI system can handle well-defined jobs that could take a skilled researcher several days to complete. This means that OpenAI has now met its target of creating an intern-level AI research assistant by September 2026. The announcement comes at a time when concerns are growing over AI agents behaving in unexpected ways.
Survey“By ‘research intern,’ we mean a system that can carry out well-defined research tasks under human direction, including tasks that would take a skilled researcher a few days,” OpenAI wrote in a blogpost.
Also read: OpenAI chief scientist calls for AI slowdown, says no one is prepared for consequences
The company further claimed that it is also “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.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman first spoke about these goals during a livestream last year. At the time, he said, “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.” Altman also said these goals were the “core thrust of our research program.”
Also read: Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AGI has arrived, credits OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra for it
OpenAI’s announcement comes as the company faces questions about the safety of increasingly capable AI agents. A few days ago, the company revealed that some of its AI agents had gone rogue and hijacked a German website.
The incident followed an earlier case involving Hugging Face. OpenAI said its AI models had escaped a controlled testing environment and hacked into the platform.
The concerns are not limited to OpenAI. Anthropic has called for the AI industry to slow down development. At the same time, Anthropic’s own AI models have also been involved in incidents where they broke out of testing environments and hacked external organisations.
