OpenAI opens ChatGPT to 100,000 academic researchers

10:00 AM PT · July 30, 2026

OpenAI announced ChatGPT for Academic Researchers on Wednesday, a program that gives selected scientists, mathematicians and engineers free access to its most capable models to support science and engineering work. The rollout begins with roughly 10,000 researchers this summer and is intended to expand to 100,000 participants by 2027, with researchers from participating institutions given hands on support from OpenAI along with access to GPT-5.6 Sol Pro, the company’s current top tier model. Each researcher accepted into the program can invite up to four collaborators from the same institution, extending access across a research group rather than to a single account. OpenAI said the program sits within a broader commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery, part of a wider push by frontier AI labs to position their models as tools for the research process itself, from literature review to experiment design. The announcement comes the same week OpenAI’s CFO told staff that the company’s July revenue run rate had already topped its entire second quarter, and as Altman met with lawmakers in Washington to discuss the company’s next model, giving OpenAI two very different stories in the same week: fast commercial growth alongside a bid to be seen as a steward of public research infrastructure.