OpenAI and ChatGPT 2025–2026: what happened and why it matters

The first thing to notice is speed. GPT-5 arrived in August 2025 after a two-year wait since GPT-4, and its launch was marred by faulty charts that Altman himself admitted. Within six months the calendar had compressed: GPT-5.3-Codex in February, GPT-5.4 in March, only two days after GPT-5.3 Instant, and GPT-5.5 in April, barely a month later.

Each step came with a concrete promise. GPT-5.4 added native computer use, letting agents operate applications, and on OpenAI's internal GDPval test across 44 occupations it matched or beat professionals in 83% of comparisons. Another outlet adds that it uses up to 47% fewer tokens on some tasks.

In June the GPT-5.6 family split into three tiers, Sol, Terra and Luna. Sol, the most powerful, shipped with an unprecedented restriction: about 20 partners approved individually by the US government, at the government's request and on cybersecurity grounds. Along the same lines, security-focused models have been released first in pilot programs with selected partners.

The product changed nature. ChatGPT stopped being just a chat window: the Atlas browser arrived with memory and agent mode, the Codex app became a command center for several coding agents and, later, Workspace Agents for business replaced custom GPTs. In May OpenAI merged ChatGPT, Codex and the API under Greg Brockman to build a single agent platform.

The partnerships point the same way. ServiceNow is embedding OpenAI agents in its enterprise software under a three-year deal; Visa supplies tokenized credentials so agents can buy things; and Plaid links bank accounts to ChatGPT for Pro subscribers in the United States. The paid lineup also widened, with a $100-a-month Pro plan that offers five times the Codex limits of the $20 plan.

The expansion also opens a monetization front: the advertising pilot passed $100 million annualized in six weeks with more than 600 advertisers, although fewer than 20% of eligible users see ads on a given day.

Sustaining that pace takes money on a new scale. Altman put the infrastructure plan at about $1.4 trillion and some 30 gigawatts, with partners such as AMD, Broadcom, Nvidia and Oracle. SoftBank took a $40 billion bridge loan, the largest in dollars in its history, to fund its stake, and financial outlets reported on a listing that could value OpenAI at $1 trillion.

The alliance structure changed too. In April Microsoft and OpenAI loosened exclusivity: OpenAI can serve its products on any cloud, and AWS added its models to Bedrock alongside other providers, following an Amazon investment that one source puts at $50 billion. In parallel OpenAI unveiled its first in-house chip with Broadcom, aimed at inference and developed in just nine months, and geopolitics reached the Stargate campus in Abu Dhabi, which Iran's Revolutionary Guard threatened.

Growth came with a growing legal load. Lawsuits linking the chatbot to suicides pushed OpenAI to estimate users' ages; a federal court required it to hand over 20 million conversations to the news organizations suing it; Britannica accuses it of using nearly 100,000 articles to train its models; and authors want answers about the deletion of two book datasets. Elon Musk, meanwhile, continues his suit over the company's turn toward profit.

The security of the ecosystem made news as well: a flaw in Atlas allowed persistent hidden commands, OpenAI revoked macOS signing certificates after a malicious package entered its delivery pipeline, and an npm package for Codex with 29,000 weekly downloads stole developer tokens for a month. As a defensive response, ChatGPT gained a Lockdown Mode that blocks outbound data paths.

The link with public power was the most delicate development. The Pentagon deal prompted the head of robotics to resign, and in June 42 attorneys general opened an investigation into the company.

Competition stopped being theoretical. According to the May Ramp AI Index, 34.4% of US businesses were using Anthropic against 32.3% for OpenAI, whose adoption had fallen; a year earlier the split was 32% to 8% in OpenAI's favor. Anthropic is also reportedly in talks on a $30 billion round at a valuation above $900 billion.

On the flanks, Meta weighed setting aside open source to compete with OpenAI and Google, and a compact Alibaba model beat gpt-oss-120B on several benchmarks while being more than 13 times smaller. Against that pressure OpenAI strengthened its roster by hiring Noam Shazeer, a co-author of the Transformer paper, from Google, and reportedly pays employees about $1.5 million on average in stock.