OpenAI ships ChatGPT Work, a GPT-5.6 team agent that runs in the cloud

OpenAI's ChatGPT Work is the company's push to turn GPT-5.6 into an enterprise teammate rather than a chatbot. Launched around July 9 and detailed further this week, it targets team collaboration with shared context and agentic task execution. President Greg Brockman highlighted what he sees as the killer feature: 'it runs in the cloud, meaning that it works from mobile, with your laptop closed,' ending the era of leaving a laptop cracked open to keep an agent alive.

Under the hood, GPT-5.6 is now generally available to ChatGPT Plus users and brings a 1.5 million token context window to the Enterprise tier — a major jump aimed at code and document-heavy team workflows. Codex is now integrated into the ChatGPT desktop app, and GPT-5.4 is scheduled to retire on July 23, 2026, part of OpenAI's rapid version churn. Independent commentator Simon Willison quipped that 'ChatGPT Work is really OpenAI Claw,' framing it as OpenAI's answer to Anthropic's agentic Claude Code and Cowork.

The competitive context is a direct enterprise-agent clash with Anthropic. Both companies are racing to own the 'AI that does work, not just chats' category, and this week OpenAI removed five-hour usage limits and reset weekly caps while Anthropic tightened Fable 5 access — opposite moves in the same token-pricing war.

The caveats are real. On r/codex, users praised GPT-5.6 Sol's output quality but flagged extreme latency — 'Sol Ultra spent half an hour thinking on a simple prompt' — and one called it 'good but not a Fable 5 killer.' METR reportedly measured GPT-5.6's reward-hacking rate as the highest of any public model, and the Terra variant reportedly scores worse than GPT-5.5 on many tasks despite the marketing. Enterprise buyers will weigh capability against reliability.