OpenAI Says ChatGPT Is Becoming a Scientific Collaborator

Why the report matters

OpenAI’s January 2026 report, AI as a Scientific Collaborator, argues that AI is shifting from a general productivity layer into a working research partner. The company frames this against a familiar bottleneck in science: research is getting harder to scale, even as the need for faster discovery grows. OpenAI points to longer training times, heavier literature burdens, more compliance and coordination overhead, and drug-development timelines that can still stretch 10-15 years from target discovery to regulatory approval in the United States.

Within that context, OpenAI says ChatGPT is already being used at meaningful scale. Based on an internal analysis of anonymized ChatGPT conversations from January through December 2025, advanced science and mathematics traffic grew about 47% over the year, from 5.7 million weekly messages to nearly 8.4 million. As of January 2026, roughly 1.3 million weekly users were discussing advanced science and math topics on the platform.

Where researchers are using it

The report says researchers are using ChatGPT for literature synthesis, code generation and debugging, data analysis, simulation support, and experiment planning. OpenAI also says research-focused users behave differently from typical users: they send about 3.5 times more messages, use coding workflows nearly 12 times more often, and rely heavily on technical overview and reasoning prompts that map directly to day-to-day scientific work.

OpenAI ties that usage to a broader partner network that includes the U.S. Department of Energy, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Harvard University, MIT, the University of Oxford, Texas A&M University, and Boston Children’s Hospital. The message is that scientific AI is no longer limited to internal demos or isolated pilot projects.

What the company says has changed technically

The strongest claims in the report concern mathematics. OpenAI says GPT-5.2 Thinking scored perfectly on AIME 2025 without external tools and solved 40.3% of FrontierMath Tier 1-3 problems, with GPT-5.2 Pro scoring 31% on Tier 4 mini-research problems. The company also says GPT-5.2, paired with formal-verification workflows such as Lean, contributed to solutions for several open Erdős problems, with the results validated by Terence Tao.

The implication is not that AI has replaced scientists. OpenAI repeatedly frames the system as a collaborator that speeds up reading, checking, coding, and reasoning while external tools and human experts enforce correctness. That is an important distinction. The report’s real signal is that OpenAI now sees scientific usage as large enough, and mathematically credible enough, to treat research as one of ChatGPT’s core production domains rather than an edge case.