Salaries for AI agents?

OpenAI is apparently considering tiered pricing for Deep Research style agents – US$2k/month for work equivalent to 'high income knowledge workers' up to US$20k/month for 'PhD-level research agents'. This pricing structure attempts to position AI agents as replacements for human workers, with costs aligned to traditional employment expenses.

The comparison with actual PhD incomes has raised eyebrows across the industry. Having had a research career I can say that is above what most PhD and postdoctoral positions offer – if you can secure one, particularly as Deep Research currently makes fundamental errors that wouldn’t be acceptable from human interns. The more pressing question remains whether these reliability issues can be resolved at all, although there is progress being made with hybrid AI models.*

Even if the hallucination problem is solved, and AI is able to discern between quality and untrustworthy sources, the economic premise seems fundamentally flawed - automation technologies historically succeed by offering cost advantages over human labour, not by matching or exceeding it.

Source: Palazzolo, S and Weinberg, C. 2025. OpenAI Plots Charging $20,000 a Month For PhD-Level Agents.

*For more on this refer to the recent Edaith’s Skills Brief – ‘Can AI models reason?’