OpenAI Unveils GPT-5.5 Focusing on Autonomous Tasks and Coding

OpenAI launched GPT-5.5 on April 23, 2026. The model is now available to users on Plus, Pro, Business, and Enterprise plans in ChatGPT and Codex, with the Pro version restricted to higher tiers.

According to the company's official statement, GPT-5.5 is the first fully retrained base model since GPT-4.5. It's specifically designed for agentic tasks, meaning those where the AI plans, executes tools, and continues working until the goal is achieved without constant user intervention. In practice, this means improved performance in coding, computer operation, research, and knowledge work.

The model maintains the same speed as GPT-5.4 but uses fewer tokens in responses, which should reduce costs for lengthy tasks. It supports a context window of 1 million tokens for input and up to 128,000 for output. According to benchmarks released by OpenAI, GPT-5.5 scored 82.7% on Terminal-Bench 2.0, compared to 75.1% for the previous version, and 73.1% on Expert-SWE, an internal long coding test.

Key Technical Improvements

• Clear improvement in agentic coding and real tool use.
• Advances in GDPval (84.9%), assessing performance in 44 different professions.
• OSWorld-Verified at 78.7%, a test of real computer interface operation.
• API pricing: $5 per million input tokens and $30 per million output tokens for the standard GPT-5.5.

OpenAI also released GPT-5.5 Pro, a more powerful version for challenging tasks, available only in the more expensive plans. The API began rolling out the following day, April 24, with extra safeguards due to its greater autonomous execution power.

The release comes just weeks after GPT-5.4, highlighting OpenAI's rapid pace in the frontier model race. Meanwhile, competitors like Anthropic and Google are also rolling out their updates during the same period.

The focus now is on how developers and companies will adopt the model in production. OpenAI is already working on more integrations and security updates to expand API access in the coming weeks.