The Pulse
OpenAI Offers Academic Labs 30 Free Seats for GPT-Rosalind
OpenAI is offering eligible U.S. university labs up to 30 free ChatGPT Business seats for 12 months through its new Rosalind Academic Plan. GPT-Rosalind access still requires a separate trusted-access approval, and the plan does not include
AI.info Team · Written with AI ·
Free seats come with a separate approval gate
OpenAI is lowering the cost for academic labs to use its life-sciences tools, but the offer does not guarantee access to the model at its center. The Rosalind Academic Plan, announced October 15, provides eligible U.S. university labs up to 30 ChatGPT Business Standard seats at no cost for up to 12 months. Labs must still pass OpenAI’s trusted-access review before members can use GPT-Rosalind.
The plan brings GPT-Rosalind and Rosalind Workbench into a shared lab workspace. OpenAI says the model is designed for biological research, including genomics, medicinal chemistry and wet-lab assistance; Workbench coordinates access to specialized tools for those workflows. Seats also include ChatGPT and Codex, subject to the plan’s usage limits.
“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
Only U.S. university labs can apply
The offer is limited to academic labs at U.S. universities. A principal investigator or designated lab lead must apply on the lab’s behalf, verify an institutional email address and submit details about the lab and its intended research. Labs at universities with an existing OpenAI Enterprise agreement must request access through that agreement instead.
OpenAI reviews the institution, the proposed work and the lab lead’s authority to manage access. The application instructions also ask labs to identify a trained biosafety contact at their institution. Approval is not automatic: an institutional email address or an existing OpenAI subscription does not, by itself, qualify a lab.
Thirty seats do not include API access
Approved labs can assign access to as many as 30 named members in one workspace. The offer covers GPT-Rosalind only after trusted-access approval and activation; the academic plan does not include API access or API credits. Researchers seeking to connect the model to their own applications will need a separate route.
OpenAI says research data shared through the plan is not used to train its models by default. The Help Center separately says the Business workspace uses standard data retention and that Zero Data Retention is not available under this offer. Universities therefore still need to check their own data-handling rules before researchers add sensitive material.
Principal investigators control the next step
Applications are open through the Rosalind Academic Plan. After approval, the principal investigator or lab lead sets up the workspace, adds eligible members and enables their GPT-Rosalind access. Labs already covered by a university Enterprise agreement should use that institution’s access process rather than create a separate academic-plan workspace.
The offer makes a dedicated life-sciences model available to more university teams without removing OpenAI’s review requirements. For labs, the immediate decision is whether the plan’s 30-seat limit, 12-month term and data-handling terms fit their research and institutional policies.