Toby Ord Calculates What AI Agents Cost Per Hour

Toby Ord ran the numbers on what frontier AI agents actually cost per hour of work, using METR benchmark data. The results complicate the narrative around exponential capability gains - o3 costs $350 per hour at its full task horizon, which exceeds typical human software engineer rates of $120 per hour. GPT-5 lands at $13 per hour for 45-minute tasks but jumps to $120 for two-hour ones. Cheaper models like Claude Sonnet 3.5 sit around $0.40 per hour but handle only shorter tasks. The uncomfortable implication is that as agents tackle harder, longer problems, their costs may scale exponentially alongside their capabilities. Most companies pricing AI agent products have avoided publishing these per-hour economics, which makes Ord's framing unusually concrete.