IBL News | New York
OpenAI this month introduced ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, a program that will give 100,000 academic researchers at selected institutions free access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work, Codex, and its frontier models, including the GPT‑5.6 family, through 2027.
The program will help researchers across the sciences, mathematics, and engineering take on advanced problems, accelerate discovery, and improve productivity, from preparing grant applications to testing hypotheses.
The San Francisco-based labs will start the program with 10,000 researchers this summer. Access is already available at institutions such as the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) and École normale supérieure (ENS).
Participants can invite up to four collaborators from their institution. Workspaces include business-grade privacy and security protections, and data is not used to train OpenAI’s models by default. Researchers can use tools and skills to support work ranging from genomic analysis and protein modeling to literature reviews, grant writing, and publishing.
The program also includes training tailored to different levels of experience, hands-on support, and opportunities to learn from other researchers, including help integrating these tools into their work.
The offer is part of an OpenAI commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery.
That includes NextGenAI, the company’s $50 million initiative supporting research institutions, and its work with the Department of Energy’s Genesis Mission to bring frontier AI to researchers at national laboratories and universities.
Currently, each week, roughly 1.3 million people use ChatGPT for advanced science and mathematics, with AI moving from occasional use on isolated problems to a more regular part of mathematical research. A growing number of papers now acknowledge ChatGPT’s contribution, reflecting how quickly researchers are adopting these tools in their work.
At launch, researchers will be able to use more than 75 life science skills spanning genetics, genomics, sequencing, single-cell analysis, protein modeling, and drug discovery. Connectors support research across disciplines, providing access to scientific literature, public genomic and clinical databases, satellite imagery, computational notebooks, data platforms, and reference managers.
