GPT-5.2 is here, and with it, OpenAI wants “to unlock even more economic value for people,” Fidji Simo, the company’s CEO of Applications, told reporters in a Thursday briefing. She said it’s been in the works for “many, many months.”

The company calls GPT-5.2 its “best model yet for everyday professional use” in a release, clearly coming for Gemini 3’s current reputation as a premier general-purpose model. OpenAI says the GPT-5.2 model series, which includes the Instant, Thinking, and Pro models, is better at “creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long contexts, using tools, and handling complex, multi-step projects.”

Aidan Clark, a VP of research at OpenAI, said in the briefing that the team gave a senior immunology researcher access to GPT-5.2 Pro. He said that when the researcher asked the model to generate the most important unanswered questions about the immune system, they said it produced “sharper questions and stronger explanations” for why those questions matter than any other frontier model.

In the blog post, OpenAI also said GPT-5.2 is better for AI agents’ workflows — part of the ever-intensifying battle between AI companies to offer the most efficient and useful AI agents. The vision is for ChatGPT to be the best possible “personalized assistant,” Max Schwarzer, a researcher at OpenAI, said during the briefing.

The company also said its Thinking model “hallucinates less” than its predecessor, making sure to highlight that the distinction makes it more useful for professionals looking for trustworthy agentic AI tools. Notion, Box, Shopify, Harvey, Zoom, and Databricks were among the pre-release testers, and they received access a couple of weeks ago, per OpenAI.

GPT-5.2’s release comes less than a month after OpenAI debuted GPT-5.1. For that series, OpenAI largely focused on making the models “warmer” and “more enjoyable” to talk to, including personality presets that gave users control over chatbot tone. GPT-5.2, OpenAI said in the blog post, builds on those tone shifts: “Users should notice GPT-5.2 feels better to use day to day—more structured, more reliable, and still enjoyable to talk to.”

The company has been grappling with Google’s recent gains in the AI space and reportedly plans to introduce two new models, one of which is codenamed Garlic, next year. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman reportedly called for a “code red” last week in an internal memo, saying he would delay certain initiatives, like advertising, in favor of making improvements to ChatGPT. During Thursday’s briefing, Simo said she had nothing further to share on advertising timelines.

“We announced this code red to really signal to the company that we want to marshal resources in this one particular area,” Simo said during the briefing.

The GPT-5.2 announcement also came the same day as news broke that OpenAI had struck a three-year licensing deal with Disney to allow “user-prompted social videos” that feature more than 200 characters from Disney, Marvel, Pixar, and Star Wars. As part of the deal, Disney will make some of those videos available to stream on Disney Plus — and become a “major customer” of OpenAI, alongside a $1 billion equity investment in the AI company.

In its blog post, OpenAI said the company is also in the “early stages” of rolling out its age-prediction model, which is intended to auto-apply certain safeguards for minors. During the briefing, Simo said the company is beginning an early rollout in certain countries to test how well it could identify teens “and not mis-identify adults,” and that they wanted to do that before introducing ChatGPT’s “adult mode” — a feature she said she expects to launch in the first quarter of 2026.

The new GPT-5.2 models will roll out today within ChatGPT, starting with OpenAI’s paid plans (ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Go, Business, and Enterprise). But the company said in the blog post that it would be deploying it “gradually” to keep the chatbot experience as “smooth and reliable” as possible. GPT-5.1, its predecessor, will be available to paid users under the “legacy models” dropdown menu for three months before the company sunsets it.

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• Hayden Field