OpenAI's Rosalind Plan: 30 Free Seats for US University Labs

OpenAI opened applications on October 15 for the Rosalind Academic Plan, offering eligible U.S. university labs up to 30 ChatGPT Business Standard seats free for up to 12 months, with GPT-Rosalind access following a separate trusted-access review. A principal investigator or lab lead applies on behalf of the team and manages approved members.

GPT-Rosalind, named after Rosalind Franklin, is OpenAI's life-sciences reasoning model, delivered through what the company calls Rosalind Workbench: "specialized tool orchestration across medicinal chemistry, genomics, wet-lab assistance, and other scientific applications." The academic plan also bundles ChatGPT and Codex for reviewing literature, working with research data and developing analysis code.

The limits matter as much as the perks. API access is not included, so labs that want to script GPT-Rosalind into a pipeline cannot do so through this program. Research data shared through the plan is not used to train OpenAI's models by default, and approval still requires institutional verification, a background review of lab leadership and a designated institutional safety contact.

Until this launch, GPT-Rosalind was "mainly for big companies and select government partners," with Amgen and Moderna named among early collaborators. The academic plan is the first general lane into the model for university research, and it lands amid our ongoing stream of OpenAI coverage as the company presses sector-specific distribution.