OpenAI Opens Free Frontier Access to 100,000 Academic Researchers

OpenAI launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers, giving free frontier-model access to researchers at selected institutions — 10,000 this summer, scaling toward 100,000 by 2027. Participants get the GPT-5.6 family across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, with expanded deep research, higher limits and larger context windows, plus four collaborator invites each. Early institutions include the Institute for Advanced Study and École normale supérieure. Workspaces carry business-grade privacy and are excluded from training by default. The interesting number is the one not published: what 100,000 subsidised research seats cost in tokens against the goodwill and citation surface they buy.