OpenAI on Thursday announced its most advanced artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.2, and said it's the best offering yet for everyday professional use.
The model is better than predecessors at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, perceiving images, writing code and understanding long context, OpenAI said. It will be available starting Thursday within OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and its application programming interface (API).
The announcement comes weeks after OpenAI launched its GPT-5.1 model. Rivals Anthropic and Google also launched new models last month, prompting OpenAI to declare a "code red" effort to improve ChatGPT and sideline other projects.
It's all part of a high-stakes battle among leading tech companies to create the most widely used model as consumers and businesses increasingly add AI into their daily lives and workflow. OpenAI is counting on its GPT family of models to define the future as the company seeks to justify its $500 billion valuation and over $1.4 trillion in planned spending.
"We announced this code red to really signal to the company that we want to martial resources in one particular area, and that's a way to really define priorities and define things that can be deprioritized," Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, told reporters in a briefing on Thursday. "We have had an increase in resources focused on ChatGPT in general, I would say that helps with the release of this model, but that's not the reason it's coming out this week in particular."
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC on Thursday that Google's release of its Gemini 3 model had less of an impact on the company's metrics than it originally feared. He said he expects OpenAI will exit its code red by January.
"I believe that when a competitive threat happens, you want to focus on it, deal with it quickly," Altman said.
OpenAI said GPT-5.2 will be available in Instant, Thinking and Pro versions. Instant is faster at writing and information seeking, Thinking is better at structured work like coding and planning and Pro will deliver the most accurate answers for difficult questions, OpenAI said.
The company said that the model tops industry benchmarks, including SWE-Bench Pro, which evaluates agentic coding performance, and GPQA Diamond, a graduate-level scientific reasoning benchmark. On GDPval, an evaluation OpenAI released earlier this year, GPT-5.2 beat or tied top industry professionals on 70.9% of well-specified tasks, the company said.
"This has been in the works for many, many months," Simo said. "While we are proud that we are able to have a cadence of releasing models fast, this particular integration has been in the works for a while."
Anthropic's latest model, Opus 4.5, scores higher than GPT-5.2 on SWE-Bench Verified, a test set that evaluates an AI system's software coding abilities. OpenAI told reporters that the benchmark is less "contamination resistant, challenging, diverse and industrially relevant" than SWE-Bench Pro.
OpenAI was founded as a research lab exactly 10 years ago, but it's become one of the fastest-growing commercial entities in the world following the launch of ChatGPT in 2022. More than 800 million people now use its chatbot every week.
WATCH: The AI pressure cooker: OpenAI, Nvidia and Google all on the move