OpenAI Launches Rosalind Academic Plan With Up to 30 Free Seats for US Labs

OpenAI introduced the Rosalind Academic Plan on October 15, 2026, offering eligible academic labs at US universities up to 30 complimentary ChatGPT Business Standard seats for up to 12 months at $0 per user per month, with access to its GPT-Rosalind life sciences model contingent on trusted-access approval. The complimentary seats include access to commercially available frontier OpenAI models, ChatGPT, and Codex within standard usage limits, though a payment card is required during setup and the offer excludes API credits, API access to GPT-Rosalind, and Zero Data Retention. OpenAI pairs GPT-Rosalind with the Rosalind Workbench — currently in research preview — and Codex to support medicinal chemistry, genomics, wet-lab assistance, protein design, and pathogen research. In a published benchmark example involving a 20-variant Nipah antiviral lipopeptide campaign, GPT-Rosalind delivered candidate comparison matrices and paired experimental study plans, whereas a model labeled Mainline Astra withheld sequence-level designs and implementation plans over high-consequence pathogen restrictions. To qualify, principal investigators at US universities without an existing OpenAI Enterprise agreement must complete Persona identity verification, register all up to 30 lab members under the same institutional .edu domain, and designate an authorized institutional biosafety contact to oversee high-sensitivity research monitoring. "Rosalind will not only help us improve our current discovery and design tasks, but also apply them at larger scales than previously possible while still providing useful insights to biological researchers." — Dr. Brian Hie, Stanford University and Arc Institute.