What Is ChatGPT Work? OpenAI's New AI Agent Explained

ChatGPT Work is a new agent built into ChatGPT that handles long, multi-step tasks on its own. Instead of answering one question at a time, it researches information, analyzes data, writes documents, builds spreadsheets, creates presentations, and even generates websites. OpenAI launched it on July 9, 2026, alongside the GPT-5.6 model family, and it marks a shift from "ask AI a question" to "give AI a job."

The launch came with another change: OpenAI merged Codex, its coding and automation tool, directly into ChatGPT. The combined product is what people are calling a ChatGPT super app. If you want to understand what ChatGPT Work actually does, how the Codex merger changes things, and what it means for your daily workflow, this guide covers the full picture.

What ChatGPT Work Actually Is

ChatGPT Work is an AI agent that runs inside ChatGPT on the web, mobile, and the desktop app. The keyword is "agent." Regular ChatGPT waits for you to type a message and responds. ChatGPT Work takes a goal, breaks it into steps, gathers information from connected apps and files, produces finished deliverables, and checks in with you along the way.

Think of the difference between asking someone, "How do I build a sales report?" and saying, "Build me a sales report using last quarter's data from our CRM." The first gets you instructions. The second gets you a finished file.

OpenAI's official release notes describe Work as an agent "for longer, more involved tasks." It can research and analyze information, work across connected apps and files, and create finished documents, spreadsheets, presentations, reports, and Sites. You can follow its progress, answer questions, change direction, and approve important actions as it works.

Work also includes Scheduled Tasks. These run once, repeat on a schedule or trigger, or monitor for changes. A marketing team could set Work to pull weekly social media metrics every Friday, compile them into a slide deck, and notify the team lead. The agent runs in the background. You don't have to be online.

How the ChatGPT Codex Merge Built a Super App

The ChatGPT Codex merge is the engine behind ChatGPT Work. Codex started as a coding tool. OpenAI launched it in May 2025 as a cloud-based software engineering agent that could read codebases, write code, run tests, and submit pull requests. By early 2026, it had grown far beyond programming.

The numbers tell the story. Codex went from roughly 800,000 weekly active users in January 2026 to over 5 million by late May. That's a sixfold increase in five months. More surprising: 20% of those users aren't programmers. They're financial analysts, designers, investment bankers, and marketing managers. Non-technical users are adopting Codex three times faster than developers.

Andrew Ambrosino, who led the Codex desktop app team, oversaw the merger. He explained in a June 2026 interview that Codex had evolved from a code editor into a general-purpose work agent. People were using it to build financial models, create pitch decks, and automate data pipelines. Merging it into ChatGPT meant those 5 million users plus ChatGPT's nearly 1 billion weekly users could all work from one entry point.

Alexander Embiricos, OpenAI's product lead for Codex, put it simply at the Intelligence at Work launch event: "You might not work 24/7, but your cloud Agent will." That's the pitch for the ChatGPT super app. One interface, one agent, running tasks even when you're asleep.

The new ChatGPT desktop app, released the same day, makes this concrete. It combines three modes: Chat for questions and conversation, Work for research and finished deliverables, and Codex for software development. On desktop, Work can access local files and desktop apps with your permission. The built-in browser lets ChatGPT gather information from websites without you switching windows.

What ChatGPT Work Features Do for You

ChatGPT Work features fall into three categories: connecting, producing, and scheduling.

Connecting. Work links to external apps like Slack, Gmail, Google Drive, and enterprise databases. The new Plugin Directory (which replaced the old App Directory) lets developers package skills, apps, and app templates for specific workflows. If your team uses Salesforce for CRM and Slack for communication, Work can pull customer data from Salesforce, draft a summary, and post it to a Slack channel. Existing app connections carry over, so you don't need to reconnect anything.

Producing. Work creates finished deliverables. Not text snippets. Actual files you can use. Documents with formatting. Spreadsheets with formulas and charts. Presentations with slides. Reports with citations. And Sites, which are lightweight interactive web pages you can share with a URL. OpenAI demonstrated this at the Intelligence at Work event: a user uploaded financial documents, and Work generated a fully interactive website that displayed the data.

Scheduling. Scheduled Tasks run automatically. You can set a task to run once (prepare a briefing for tomorrow's meeting), repeat on a schedule (compile weekly metrics every Monday), or monitor for changes (alert me when a competitor updates their pricing page). Tasks appear on a dedicated Scheduled page in the sidebar where you can view, pause, edit, or delete them. Tasks can't run more than once per hour, and inactive tasks may auto-pause.

ChatGPT Work vs Regular ChatGPT: What’s Different

The distinction matters because both live in the same app. Here's how they compare.

Regular ChatGPT is conversational. You type, it responds. You ask a follow-up, it answers. The interaction is back-and-forth, and you drive every step. It's good for quick questions, brainstorming, drafting text, and learning new concepts.

ChatGPT Work is autonomous. You give it a goal, and it plans the steps, gathers resources, and produces output. You can watch it work, jump in to redirect, or step away entirely. It's built for tasks that would take a human 30 minutes to several hours.

Aspect	Regular ChatGPT	ChatGPT Work
Input	One message at a time	A goal or project description
Output	Text responses	Documents, spreadsheets, slides, websites
Tool access	Limited to chat	Connects to Slack, Gmail, Drive, databases
Duration	Seconds to minutes	Minutes to hours
Scheduling	Not available	Scheduled and monitoring tasks
Availability	All plans	Paid plans (Pro, Plus, Business, Enterprise, Edu)

Work is rolling out to paid plans only. Free and Go users don't have access. Pro, Pro Lite, Enterprise, and Edu users got it first. Plus and Business users are getting it over the following days. Enterprise and Edu workspaces have a two-week preview period where Work is off by default, and admins can opt out before it turns on automatically.

Codex vs Claude Code: How OpenAI's Agent Compares

The Codex vs Claude Code comparison is one of the most searched topics in the AI coding space. Both are AI agents that can write, edit, and run code. But they take different approaches.

Codex runs in the cloud. You submit a task, it works in an isolated sandbox, and returns the result. You can close your laptop and come back to a finished pull request. Claude Code runs locally in your terminal. Every step happens on your machine in real time. You see each file change as it happens.

Independent benchmarks show different strengths. On SWE-Bench Verified, which tests real-world bug fixing from GitHub issues, Claude Code scores higher (around 80%). On Terminal-Bench 2.0, which tests command-line workflows, Codex leads (77.3% vs 65.4%). A community blind test with over 500 developers found that 67% preferred Claude Code's code quality for complex tasks, while Codex users reported faster execution and lower token consumption.

Dimension	OpenAI Codex	Anthropic Claude Code
Architecture	Cloud sandbox	Local terminal
Code quality (blind test)	25% preference	67% preference
Token efficiency	~150M per task	~620M per task
Terminal-Bench 2.0	77.3%	65.4%
SWE-Bench Verified	~55%	~81%
Best for	Parallel tasks, batch processing	Deep refactoring, interactive coding

Third-party evaluation from Artificial Analysis, a benchmarking service that tracks AI model performance, confirms that both tools have narrowed the gap significantly in 2026. The choice depends on workflow: Codex for fire-and-forget tasks, Claude Code for hands-on collaborative coding.

Now that Codex is merged into ChatGPT, the comparison extends beyond developers. A financial analyst using ChatGPT Work to build a quarterly report is indirectly using Codex's cloud execution engine. They just don't see the code. They see a finished spreadsheet.

OpenAI Productivity Tool: Enterprise Use Cases

Enterprise revenue already accounts for 40% of OpenAI's total income. Denise Dresser, OpenAI's Chief Revenue Officer, said that figure is expected to exceed 50% by year-end. ChatGPT Work is the product designed to push that number higher.

OpenAI shared several internal use cases at the launch. The finance team uses Work to find source data, transfer it into Excel or Google Sheets, run reconciliations, and build slide decks for the month-end close. What used to take days now takes hours. The sales team uses it to turn a single discovery conversation into a proof-of-concept within 24 hours.

Six role-specific plugins launched alongside Work: data analysis, creative production, sales, product design, public equity investment, and investment banking. Together, they connect to 62 enterprise applications and include 110 pre-built automation skills. A marketing manager can use the creative production plugin to generate campaign materials that follow brand guidelines. An investment banker can use the IB plugin to pull financial filings, build comparable company analyses, and format them into a pitch book.

OpenAI itself is the most extreme case. According to a research paper co-authored with Columbia Business School and Wharton, 97.9% of OpenAI employees used Codex by June 2026. Internally, Codex and ChatGPT Work handle nearly 100% of weekly output tokens across finance, legal, recruiting, and engineering teams. The top 1% of power users generate over 60 hours of agent runtime per day by running multiple agents in parallel.

Is Your Data Safe With ChatGPT Work?

This is the question enterprise users ask first, and the answer depends on your plan.

Enterprise and Edu plans don't use your data for model training. Admins control what apps and plugins can connect. Workspace settings include a Plugins page where admins can manage discovery, installation policies, and role-based access. The July 2026 update added granular controls: admins can enable or disable plugins per workspace or per role, set whether plugins install by default, and view which apps each plugin uses.

Plus and Pro plans have different data handling. OpenAI's privacy policy allows using chat data to improve models unless you opt out. Work tasks that connect to external apps like Slack or Gmail send data through those apps' own APIs, so your Slack data is still governed by Slack's security policies.

Desktop app permissions work like any desktop software. Work can access local files and desktop apps, but only with your permission. The built-in browser runs on your machine. A separate cloud browser runs on OpenAI's servers for agent tasks that need web access.

OpenAI also rolled out Active Sessions in June 2026. You can review all sessions associated with your account from Settings, see device, app, approximate location, and sign-in time, and log out of any session you don't recognize.

There's a genuine tension here. Work becomes more useful the more apps it connects to. But each connection expands the data surface. Enterprise admins should review the Plugin Directory carefully before enabling plugins workspace-wide. Individual users on Plus or Pro should check their data settings before connecting personal accounts.

What the Atlas Browser Shutdown Means and How to Access ChatGPT Work

OpenAI announced on July 9, 2026 that it's shutting down Atlas, its AI-powered browser, on August 9. Atlas launched in October 2025 and lasted less than a year.

The shutdown is part of a broader strategy to consolidate products. OpenAI's Applications CEO Fidji Simo told employees in March that the company had spread itself across too many apps and tech stacks. The video tool Sora was shut down earlier. Atlas is next. The goal is to focus resources on the ChatGPT super app.

If you used Atlas, here's what happens. Its browsing capabilities are moving to three places:

1. ChatGPT desktop app gets a built-in browser with tab support, password management, and autofill. You can browse websites, log into accounts, download files, and interact with web pages without leaving the app.

2. Chrome extension adds a ChatGPT sidebar to Google Chrome. You can ask questions about the current page, summarize content, or start long tasks without switching tabs.

3. Cloud browser runs on OpenAI's servers. This is what Work and Codex use when they need to visit websites or interact with web-based tools. You don't see it. The agent uses it behind the scenes.

James Sun, an OpenAI product manager, said the new browsing features were built from what the team learned from Atlas users. The lesson: people don't want a separate AI browser. They want AI browsing inside the tools they already use.

For ChatGPT app Android users, the Atlas shutdown has minimal direct impact. Atlas never had a stable Android release. The mobile app already has its own web browsing for research tasks. What changes is that Work, when it arrives on mobile, will use the same cloud browser infrastructure that replaced Atlas.

ChatGPT Work is available now on the web and mobile for paid plans. Here's the rollout schedule:

- Pro and Pro Lite: Available now

- Enterprise and Edu: Two-week preview period, off by default; admins can opt out

- Plus and Business: Rolling out over the days following launch

- Free and Go: Not available

The new ChatGPT desktop app is available globally for macOS and Windows. It combines Chat, Work, and Codex in one application. On a desktop, Work can use local files and desktop apps with your permission.

For Android users, the ChatGPT app Android version supports Work through the mobile interface. You can start a Work task from your phone, monitor its progress, and approve actions. The mobile experience is designed for oversight rather than creation. You start a task on a desktop or a mobile, then manage it from wherever you are.

If you want to try ChatGPT Work, you can download ChatGPT from APKPure.

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Updated July 2026 to cover the ChatGPT Work launch, Codex merger details, Atlas browser shutdown, Plugin Directory rollout, and enterprise use cases. Check back as OpenAI continues rolling out Work to additional plans and regions.