OpenAI Will Provide Free AI Models To Select Researchers

OpenAI is launching a new program called ChatGPT for Academic Researchers that will offer free access to the company’s AI models to 100,000 scientists, mathematicians and engineers. Researchers from “select academic institutions” included in the program will receive hands-on support from OpenAI, access to the company’s latest GPT-5.6 Sol Pro model and be able to invite four collaborators from their institution to participate.

The program will start with 10,000 participants this summer and scale up to 100,000 through 2027. OpenAI says offering free access to its AI tools “is part of a commitment of more than $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery.” As the company notes, researchers are already using AI models to sift through data and write grants — this just makes the relationship a bit more formal. OpenAI’s version of ChatGPT for schools, ChatGPT Edu, follows a similar logic.

While the least charitable read of the program is that OpenAI is looking for new sources of training data, the company says that by default, researchers’ data will not be used to train models. What handing out freebies to research institutions could generate, though, is more research breakthroughs that in some way involved a GPT model. And making more scientific fields dependent on the company’s tools could also pave the way for future revenue from for-profit research.

This isn’t the first time the company has courted researchers. OpenAI introduced Prism in January, an AI-powered tool for working with scientific journals and documents. Prism is available to anyone with a ChatGPT account and can be used to verify things like research citations and formatting. OpenAI’s early demo of the tool also included a way to generate lesson plans, one of the more tedious but critical tasks of research professors.