OpenAI Will Give 100,000 Users Free Access to Its Most Powerful AI Models

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a new program that will give up to 100,000 scientists, mathematicians, and engineers free access to its advanced AI models.

The program will begin with 10,000 researchers this summer and expand to 100,000 participants through 2027. It is open to qualifying researchers at selected academic institutions with high levels of research activity.

Participants will get access to OpenAI's frontier models across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex, including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro at launch.

Researchers will also receive higher usage limits, larger context windows, expanded deep research capabilities, training and hands-on support. Each approved researcher can invite up to four collaborators from the same institution.

OpenAI says the tools can support work ranging from genomic analysis and protein modeling to literature reviews, grant applications, coding, data analysis and publishing.

OpenAI says workspaces under the program will include business-grade privacy and security protections, and researchers' data will not be used to train its models by default.

The company says around 1.3 million people already use ChatGPT for advanced science and mathematics each week, generating roughly 8.4 million messages.

The new program is part of OpenAI's commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery. This also includes its $50 million NextGenAI initiative and work with the US Department of Energy's Genesis Mission.

This is not OpenAI's first effort aimed specifically at researchers.

In January, the company launched Prism, a free AI-powered workspace for scientific writing and collaboration. It helps researchers work with papers, equations, citations, and literature while using AI directly inside the document. Prism is available to anyone with a personal ChatGPT account.

For institutions already using ChatGPT Edu, access provided through the new Academic Researchers program will be coordinated through the institution's existing workspace.

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