OpenAI gives 100,000 researchers free GPT-5.6 Sol Pro and Codex
Free through 2027 for research universities: frontier models, deep research, connectors and 75+ life-science skills — and data untrained by default.
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The offer: frontier models, free through 2027
Approved researchers get the full GPT-5.6 family — Sol Pro, Terra and Luna — plus Codex, ChatGPT Work, expanded deep research, higher usage limits and bigger context windows. It's all free, funded by OpenAI's $250M commitment to external science through 2027.
Who qualifies — and +4 collaborators each
Eligibility is limited to selected degree-granting universities with a high level of research activity, and it's already live at the Institute for Advanced Study and École normale supérieure. You verify institutional affiliation to get in, and each approved researcher can invite up to four collaborators from the same institution.
The builder hook: Codex wired to GitHub and Zotero
Beyond chat, the program bundles Codex plus connectors to GitHub, Zotero, scientific literature and genomic databases, and 75+ life-science skills spanning genomics, protein modeling and drug discovery. If you build research tooling, that's a free frontier coding agent already plugged into your sources.
Rollout: 10,000 now, 100,000 by 2027
Access opens to 10,000 researchers this summer and scales to 100,000 through 2027. Applications are open now with no stated deadline — you describe your active research and intended scientific use to be considered.
Privacy: not used for training by default
Workspaces ship with business-grade privacy and security, and research data is not used to train OpenAI's models by default — a meaningful contrast with consumer ChatGPT's defaults for anyone weighing what they can safely paste in.