OpenAI offers 100,000 researchers free frontier AI

OpenAI will give 100,000 researchers at selected institutions free frontier-model access through 2027, starting with 10,000 researchers this summer and backing the broader effort with more than $250 million. The offer includes GPT-5.6, Codex, expanded deep research, and more than 75 life-science skills—useful distribution context for teams weighing the economics described in OpenAI’s push into AI drug discovery. Builders in scientific tooling should file away the scale: subsidized model access could seed 100,000 demanding users whose workflows expose where today’s research stack still breaks.