Epoch Brief: AI costs down 13x a year, up to 2B agents
Epoch AI's October 8 brief estimates that AI chips shipped through 2027 could support about 30–170 million concurrent frontier-model agents — or nearly 2 billion running cheaper models — and that the cost of a fixed level of AI performance has fallen roughly 47% per quarter over three years, about 13x a year and four times faster than DNA sequencing. The brief also says six leading Chinese AI companies (Alibaba, ByteDance, Z.ai, Moonshot, DeepSeek, MiniMax) generate about a tenth of OpenAI and Anthropic's combined AI-related revenue, that trade data is consistent with more than $3 billion of chips smuggled into China via Malaysia, and that the share of US adults using AI six to seven days a week rose from 8% in March to 19% in August 2026. On internal use and evaluation, it cites OpenAI's finding that its median researcher's daily coding-agent usage, valued at API prices, grew from under $1 in January 2026 to about $600 by mid-August, and reports that no model came close on its new InnovationEval test of automating AI R&D, while its Benchmark Reviews audit graded 4 of 15 benchmarks verified and 9 flawed.
The brief bundles agent-scale, cost-decline and China-revenue estimates into one comparable picture, giving practitioners a rough yardstick for how fast AI capability and usage are spreading.