• OpenAI has made GPT-5 available to all users, including in free tier.
• Model runs faster, makes fewer errors, and uses “safe completions” for sensitive prompts, company says.

OpenAI’s newest model, GPT-5, is now available to all users – including those on the free tier. The company says GPT-5 works faster, answers better, and is more useful for tasks like writing, coding, and helping in areas like health care.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said he didn’t enjoy switching back to GPT-4 after using the latest model. “I tried going back to GPT-4, and it was quite miserable,” he told reporters during a recent briefing.

ChatGPT, OpenAI’s chatbot powered by its language models, is now used by around 700 million people weekly. The company is also in early talks with investors about a possible stock sale that could value it at $500 billion, according to CNBC.

One of the key changes in GPT-5 is how often it “hallucinates” – a term used when AI makes up information. OpenAI says this happens less often with the new model. The company also ran more than 5,000 hours of safety tests while building it.

GPT-5 also takes a different approach when faced with risky or sensitive questions. Rather than refusing to respond entirely, the model offers a general response that avoids giving harmful details. “GPT-5 has been trained to recognise when a task can’t be finished, avoid speculation and can explain limitations more clearly,” said Michelle Pokrass, who works on post-training at OpenAI.

During the demo, the company showed how GPT-5 could turn simple prompts into working software. They asked it to create a language learning app to help English speakers study French. The prompt called for features like flashcards, quizzes, a fun theme, and progress tracking. Two separate GPT-5 sessions produced different versions of the app in seconds.

The apps needed a bit of cleanup, an OpenAI staffer said, but users can make changes easily – like adjusting the layout or adding new tabs.

The release marks the first time free ChatGPT users will get access to a model with reasoning capabilities – meaning it runs an internal thought process before replying. If they hit their use limit, they’ll be shifted to GPT-5 mini, a smaller version of the same model.

Subscribers to the Plus plan get more use room, and Pro users can access GPT-5 without limits, as well as GPT-5 Pro, a higher-tier version. Enterprise and education customers will start getting access about a week after the public rollout.

Microsoft, OpenAI’s close partner and investor, is bringing GPT-5 into its own products. A company blog post said GPT-5 will power Microsoft 365 Copilot and Azure’s AI tools. On social media, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reflected on how far AI has come since Altman visited Microsoft’s headquarters in 2023 to present GPT-4.

Other companies are already testing the new model. Box, which makes file management software for businesses, tried GPT-5 on large sets of data. CEO Aaron Levie said older models had trouble understanding long documents that involved complex math or logic, but GPT-5 handled them better. “The model is able to retain way more of the information that it’s looking at, and then use a much higher level of reasoning and logic capabilities to be able to make decisions,” he said in an interview with CNBC.

OpenAI is also giving developers three different versions of GPT-5 through its API: the standard model, GPT-5 mini, and GPT-5 nano. The are designed to support different needs when it comes to speed and cost.

Earlier in the week, the company also released two open-source language models, the first time OpenAI has released models like this since GPT-2 launched in 2019. The new models are meant to be easier and cheaper to use, especially for developers and researchers.

Altman called the two open-source models – GPT-OSS-120b and GPT-OSS-20b – “a big deal,” saying on social media that they’re “the best and most usable open models in the world.”

The release into the open came as China’s AI firms continue to release more open-source models. Companies like Alibaba Cloud have built popular model families, like Qwen, that are gaining international attention. According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s recent moves – including GPT-5 and the open models – are part of a broader strategy as it considers a new stock sale.

OpenAI said its two open models perform about as well as o4-mini and o3-mini, which are among its smaller reasoning models. The release of open models suggests the company is returning to its original goal of making AI more accessible to the public – an effort many saw as slowing down in recent years. However, China appears to have the upper hand in terms of the number of competitive open models available.

“In the open-source space overall, China still has an edge over the US in the number of highly competitive models available,” said Ray Wang, a research director at consultancy Futurum Group. He added that OpenAI’s move might put pressure on its Chinese competitors.

The open-source trend picked up speed after Hangzhou-based DeepSeek introduced two low-cost, high-performance models in late 2023 and early 2024. That moment reportedly led Altman to question whether OpenAI had made the right call by not pursuing open-source releases as much as its competitors.

In the weeks since, more Chinese AI companies have entered the spotlight. Alibaba upgraded its Wan video generation tool and released Qwen-Image, a model that improves on previous iterations’ ablities at reading and editing text inside images. Zhipu AI, based in Beijing, launched GLM-4.5, which it says ranked third globally and first in China in a series of benchmarks. Another Beijing firm, Moonshot AI, released the Kimi 2 model last month, which has 1 trillion parameters – far more than OpenAI’s open-source offerings.

Altogether, China now has 1,509 AI models, both open and proprietary, according to data from the 2025 World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

OpenAI’s open-source models are getting attention in China too. A discussion thread about the models on Zhihu, a Chinese Q&A site, received over 250,000 views. Some local companies are paying close attention. Zhipu referred to the new models as “game changers.”

While GPT-5 and the open-source models are getting most of the attention, Altman says there’s more to come. He believes GPT-5 represents a step forward not just in speed and quality, but in how natural it feels to talk to.

“I think having something like GPT-5 would be pretty much unimaginable at any previous time in human history,” he said.

Rival companies are also claiming breakthroughs. Last month, Elon Musk said the latest version of Grok was “better than PhD level in everything” and described it as the “smartest AI” to date.

OpenAI is also promoting GPT-5 as a helpful coding assistant – part of a wider trend among US firms aiming at software developers. Anthropic’s Claude Code is one example of a model focused on similar tasks.

Altman said one major shift is how AI is changing what people can do with simple ideas. “People are limited by ideas, but not really the ability to execute, in many new ways,” he said.

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