OpenAI on Thursday released its newest AI model, GPT-5.5, to its paid subscribers.
The release, coming just six weeks after the company debuted GPT-5.4, is an extremely fast turnaround that underscores how fiercely frontier AI labs are competing for enterprise customers, and how their models are increasingly evolving through continuous, incremental updates.
The company also said there are 4 million active Codex users and 9 million paying business users on ChatGPT. ChatGPT also has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million subscribers. It no doubt hopes those figures will undercut a narrative that has been building across social media that OpenAI has lost traction among consumers and has fallen behind its arch-rival Anthropic in the race for enterprise customers.
OpenAI president Greg Brockman called the new model a “new class of intelligence” and “a big step towards more agentic and intuitive computing” during a press briefing. He acknowledged that “there are enough model releases that it’s probably getting hard to distinguish one from another,” but said GPT-5.5 can do more with less guidance and is “way more intuitive to use—it can look at an unclear problem and figure out what needs to happen next.”
