AIBRIEF
The program starts with 10,000 seats this summer at the Institute for Advanced Study and France's École normale supérieure (ENS), part of a $250 million push through 2027.
OpenAI is launching a program to give 100,000 academic researchers free access to its frontier AI models, starting with 10,000 seats this summer and scaling through 2027. "Frontier" here means OpenAI's most capable model class. The first institutions are the Institute for Advanced Study and the French grande école École normale supérieure (ENS), per the announcement.
The program, called ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, centers on the GPT-5.6 family and its Sol Pro model for hard problems. Each approved researcher can invite up to four institutional collaborators, who count toward the program total.
Participants get ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, and Codex with expanded deep research, larger context windows, and higher usage limits, plus tools for genomic analysis, protein modeling, literature reviews, grant writing, and publishing, as well as connectors to scientific literature, public genomic and clinical databases, satellite imagery, and computational notebooks. Workspaces include business-grade privacy, and OpenAI says data is not used to train its models by default.
The move is part of more than $250 million OpenAI has committed through 2027 for external scientific research, including the $50 million NextGenAI initiative and work with the Department of Energy's Genesis Mission at national labs. OpenAI cites roughly 1.3 million people using ChatGPT weekly for advanced science and mathematics, generating about 8.4 million messages a week. Applications are open to recognized degree-granting institutions with a high level of research activity.