OpenAI launches ChatGPT for researchers in Australia

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Academic Researchers in Australia, offering free access to 100,000 researchers at selected academic institutions.

The rollout begins with 10,000 researchers. Access is already available at institutions including the Institute for Advanced Study and École normale supérieure, and Australian researchers at a selection of universities are also eligible.

The programme targets scientists, mathematicians and engineers, and approved participants can invite up to four collaborators from the same institution. OpenAI plans to expand the programme to 100,000 researchers by 2027.

Participants will receive access to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, including GPT-5.6 Sol Pro at launch. The service is intended to support tasks ranging from literature reviews and grant applications to genomic analysis, protein modelling, coding and hypothesis testing.

For institutions already using ChatGPT Edu, access through the new programme will be coordinated through the existing workspace. Researcher data is not used to train OpenAI's models by default.

Funding push

The launch is part of OpenAI's broader commitment of more than USD $250 million through 2027 to support external scientific research and discovery. That total includes NextGenAI, a USD $50 million initiative for research institutions, and work with the US Department of Energy's Genesis Mission for researchers at national laboratories and universities.

OpenAI says about 1.3 million people use ChatGPT for advanced science and mathematics each week, generating roughly 8.4 million messages. It also says adoption has become particularly visible in mathematics, where AI has shifted over the past six months from occasional use on isolated problems to more regular use in research.

The company also points to a rise in academic papers acknowledging ChatGPT's contribution. Researchers who use AI most intensively in their fields are almost twice as likely as their peers to assign it tasks estimated to require four hours or more, according to OpenAI.

Research uses

According to OpenAI, ChatGPT is being used to question ideas, gather knowledge, generate hypotheses and communicate findings, while Codex is used for writing code, formal analysis and reviewing results. The company cited examples in fusion research and theoretical computer science.

Physicist Rogerio Jorge and his team are using AI to develop open-source fusion research software used by industry and national laboratories to design fusion energy devices, OpenAI says. In another example, researchers Barna Saha, Yinzhan Xu and Christopher Ye used GPT-5.5 Pro to develop a proof on limits in high-dimensional geometry problems before validating and refining the results themselves.

Participants in the academic programme will have expanded deep research access, higher usage limits and larger context windows. They will also be able to use more than 75 life science skills covering genetics, genomics, sequencing, single-cell analysis, protein modelling and drug discovery.

According to OpenAI, connectors included in the service provide access to scientific literature, public genomic and clinical databases, satellite imagery, computational notebooks, data platforms and reference managers. Codex can also assist with debugging code, analysing datasets and building reproducible workflows.

Australian access

Australian institutions named as eligible include the University of Melbourne, the University of New South Wales, the University of Sydney, Australian National University, Monash University, the University of Queensland, the University of Technology Sydney, RMIT University and Macquarie University.

Applicants must verify their institutional affiliation and provide information about their active research and intended scientific use. Each invited collaborator must also verify their affiliation and will count towards the programme's total number of accounts.

The programme also includes training tailored to different levels of AI experience, from first-time users to researchers developing more advanced applications in their fields. Participants will have access to specialists familiar with research workflows and support for integrating the tools into their work.

Feedback from researchers will be used to assess where the models are useful, where they fall short and how they can be made more valuable to the research community, OpenAI says.

OpenAI says its strategy "is to put capable tools in the hands of the research community and let researchers pursue the questions they know best".