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ZDNET's key takeaways
- Prism is a free, collaborative AI workspace for research.
- It's meant to support, not replace, human-led science.
- AI-enabled workspaces aim to unite disparate tools.
This fall, OpenAI deepened its investment in AI for science as the technology's next frontier, citing advancements in GPT-5 as proof of its viability as a research tool -- and eventual scientific automation system. As a first step to that end, OpenAI has launched Prism, a new collaborative workspace for scientists.
"In 2025, AI changed software development forever," OpenAI said in the announcement. "In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science."
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Prism is powered by GPT-5.2, the company's newest model, which was released last month. At the time, OpenAI said GPT-5.2 performs "at or above human expert level," but the company doesn't advise you to let it automate your research -- here's why.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
How Prism works
OpenAI has invested heavily in demonstrating scientific use cases for its models, releasing papers on its prowess in mathematical discovery, cell analysis, and biology experiments. But the tools scientists currently use, OpenAI argued in the announcement, constrain "how research is done day to day." Enter Prism.
Geared toward science writing and report compilation, which requires collaboration amongst several participants, Prism "brings drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace," OpenAI said, referring to the LaTeX scientific typesetting standard.
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Prism puts GPT-5.2 inside a scientific project, ideally for a more seamless experience. According to OpenAI, it's based on Crixet, a platform the company purchased and folded into this new release.
In a demo, OpenAI developers walked through Prism's interface: a chat window on the left and an in-process research paper on the right. Prism lets scientists access multiple chat agents simultaneously, each executing different commands. These can include adding sources from arXiv and other platforms, creating lecture notes based on a topic, complete with citations, or perfecting equations and figures. Users can also test hypotheses with GPT-5.2 Thinking as a copilot, LaTeX-format diagrams, and edit several documents within one project.
Similarly to Claude's just-released Slack, Asana, and Figma integrations and comparable features in ChatGPT, the goal of Prism and tools like it is to centralize systems for ease of use.
"Much of the everyday work of research -- drafting papers, revising arguments, managing equations and citations, and coordinating with collaborators -- remains fragmented," OpenAI said. "Researchers often move between editors, PDFs, LaTeX compilers, reference managers, and separate chat interfaces, losing context and interrupting focus."
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OpenAI said reasoning models are less likely to hallucinate citations -- a primary issue in using AI for research, law, and other academic contexts -- because their extended thinking process forces them to review material more closely.
Whether that can be verified across the board or not, uploading unpublished or in-progress information, especially study findings, to a chatbot sparks privacy and security concerns. OpenAI clarified that, because users access Prism via their personal ChatGPT account, all privacy-protecting measures already in place in ChatGPT would also apply to content shared in Prism.
In an October livestream, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned that the company aims to launch a "research intern"-level tool by September, and automated AI research by March 2028. OpenAI said Prism isn't meant to be that intern, but is rather a bigger part of its science-forward mission.
Limitations
Tools like Prism aren't meant to automate research, however. In a November 2025 paper, OpenAI hedged that while GPT-5 can "expand the surface area of exploration" and quicken an expert's workflow, it shouldn't be left to run projects or solve problems on its own. In the demo, developers referred to Prism as a "powertool" for scientists, not a replacement.
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More broadly, companies are shipping AI models at much faster rates to keep up with industry competition and user demand. It's unclear how this impacts highly specific, fact-heavy use cases like science, even with GPT-5's benchmark performance, which rivals that of competing frontier models.
Beyond that, public trust in science itself is in a shaky place, a reality OpenAI acknowledged during the demo. But the company doesn't think AI has to worsen that.
"As AI becomes more capable, there are real concerns about volume, quality, and trust in the scientific record," an OpenAI representative told ZDNET. "Our view is that the right response isn't to keep AI at arm's length, or to let it operate invisibly in the background -- it's to integrate it directly into scientific workflows in ways that preserve accountability and keep researchers firmly in control."
The AI workspace future
At their best, AI tools can be frictionless portals to the many platforms you need for work (and sometimes play). The industry's sights are now set on turning what have been simply chatbots into full-fledged, assistant-equipped workspaces -- even your inbox. These will rival what we've come to expect from traditional software by offering a single, convenient entry point and executing commands in natural language.
How to access
Anyone with a personal ChatGPT account can access Prism starting today. Because "Prism is designed to expand access," OpenAI said, the tool is subscription-free; users can create unlimited projects and add unlimited seats to account for the inherently collaborative nature of scientific research. That said, OpenAI said the new workspace will be available to ChatGPT Business, Team, Enterprise, and Education users soon, and that "more powerful AI features" will be coming to paid ChatGPT users soon.
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