ChatGPT Work does your office tasks for hours — and the basic version is free

ChatGPT can now finish a project and send updates through your work apps while you’re away from your laptop. OpenAI‘s new ChatGPT Work, powered by the just-released GPT-5.6 model family, runs multi-step tasks autonomously in the background for hours — accessing your files, browsing the web, and executing actions across connected services. It is not a chat assistant that waits for your next message. It is a work queue.

The launch merges two previously separate tools: ChatGPT, the conversational assistant used by hundreds of millions of people, and Codex, the coding agent OpenAI released earlier this year. The standalone Codex application is gone; its capabilities are now built into ChatGPT Work alongside an integrated browser and a plugin directory covering services from Slack and Google Drive to Salesforce and GitHub. The old ChatGPT desktop app is now called ChatGPT Classic.

Three new models power the service. Sol is the flagship, designed for advanced reasoning and extended agentic tasks. Terra handles everyday work and is priced to compete with GPT-5.5 at roughly half the cost. Luna is the fastest and cheapest option. Which tier you get depends on your plan: Sol requires Pro or Enterprise, while free users now access Terra — a genuine capability upgrade from what free ChatGPT offered before.

In practice, this means you can give ChatGPT Work a project — compile this month’s sales figures into a slide deck, draft ten social posts from this document, or respond to a backlog of support tickets — and it will work through the steps and deliver finished material without supervision. OpenAI says the product handles tasks across web, desktop, and the apps you’ve connected, not just text in a browser window.

The risks scale with the ambition. Granting an AI agent access to your Google Drive, Slack workspace, and email requires trusting it not to make consequential mistakes in shared documents. OpenAI says ChatGPT Work includes real-time monitoring and safeguards, but those have not been tested at production scale. Autonomous background operation also means the agent can continue working after you’ve closed your laptop — convenient until it acts on outdated instructions.

The launch puts OpenAI directly against Microsoft Copilot, which has offered similar office automation inside Microsoft 365 for over a year, and against Anthropic‘s Claude Cowork, which expanded from desktop to web and mobile four days before ChatGPT Work launched. Anthropic’s own usage data — drawn from 1.2 million anonymized sessions — found that fewer than 9% of AI agent work involves coding; business operations account for more than a third. OpenAI’s decision to retire Codex as a standalone tool appears to reflect the same reality.

ChatGPT Work is currently available for Pro, Enterprise, and Edu subscribers, with expansion to Plus and Business plans expected within days of its launch. GPT-5.6 is also available via the OpenAI API for developers building with it directly. OpenAI’s standalone Atlas browser, which previously ran agent tasks in a separate window, will be retired on August 9.

Tags: OpenAI, chatgpt, GPT-5.6, AI agents, ChatGPT Work, Codex