OpenAI Offers Free GPT-5.6 Sol Pro Access to 100,000 Academic Researchers

OpenAI announced "ChatGPT for Academic Researchers," granting free access to its frontier GPT-5.6 Sol Pro model. The program begins with 10,000 faculty and postdocs this summer, scaling to 100,000 through 2027. Each participant can invite four institutional collaborators. The $250 million commitment defaults to not using researchers' data for model training — a critical guardrail for sensitive or unpublished work.