OpenAI offered 100,000 researchers free frontier access. The first round has become a lottery.
OpenAI's ChatGPT for Academic Researchers programme, announced on 29 July, gives faculty and postdocs twelve months of free Pro-level access to the GPT-5.6 family across ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex, and lets each participant invite up to four colleagues from the same institution. Demand overran it. In an update posted on 10 August, OpenAI said more than 13,000 applications had arrived in the first wave, requesting as many as 65,000 seats, and that it would fill the opening 10,000-seat cohort by lottery among eligible applicants. New applicants now join a waitlist. Anyone not drawn stays eligible for later rounds, and applications reopen in the autumn. Eligibility is limited to recognised degree-granting universities with a high level of research activity; applicants must verify their institutional affiliation and describe the research they intend to do.
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