ChatGPT Work Can Now Run Your Job for Hours, Unsupervised

An AI that keeps working on your project for hours after you've closed the laptop. That's the pitch behind ChatGPT Work, OpenAI's newest weapon in the increasingly crowded fight for your office.

Per the company's own announcement, ChatGPT Work is an agent that can take action across your apps and files, stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work. It gathers context from your connected tools, plans an approach, then delivers spreadsheets, slides, documents, reports, or even full websites.

ChatGPT Work Keeps Working While You Don't

The feature leans on Scheduled Tasks so projects keep moving even when you're away from your computer or phone. It can, for example, turn new Slack or Teams messages into updated docs and share the important changes with your team automatically.

OpenAI used the launch to merge its Codex app into the main ChatGPT desktop client, and confirmed it will shut down its Atlas browser in early August. That's a fairly aggressive consolidation for a company that just months ago was juggling three separate agent products.

GPT-5.6 Powers ChatGPT Work, After a Political Detour

None of this works without GPT-5.6, released in three flavors: Sol for raw power, Terra for everyday tasks, and Luna for speed. Getting there wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

ChatGPT Work is powered by GPT-5.6, which was released Thursday after initially being delayed by the Trump administration, a saga we covered in our earlier piece on the White House dispute. Government scrutiny of frontier models is clearly becoming a permanent fixture, not a one-off headache.

Claude Cowork and Copilot Cowork Got There First

Let's be honest: OpenAI isn't first to this particular party. Anthropic's Claude Cowork launched back in January and expanded to mobile and web in early July, while Microsoft made Copilot Cowork generally available to Microsoft 365 customers in mid-June.

So the real question isn't who invented the office agent, it's who convinces businesses to actually pay for one. ChatGPT Work is live today for Pro, Enterprise, and Edu plans, with Plus and Business access expected within days.

Codex Was the Trojan Horse

More than 5 million people use Codex every week, and over a million of them now use it for tasks that have nothing to do with writing code. That base is quietly what powers ChatGPT Work under the hood, and it's a bet that could pay off if enterprises bite.

What is ChatGPT Work?

ChatGPT Work is an agent built into ChatGPT that handles multi-step projects for hours at a time, pulling context from connected apps and files to produce finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, or websites.

Is ChatGPT Work free to use?

No, ChatGPT Work launched exclusively for paid Pro, Enterprise, and Edu plans, with access expanding to Plus and Business subscribers within days of launch.