Willison maps ChatGPT Work as two products in one $20 tier

ChatGPT Work is actually two products. That is the flat finding of Simon Willison's Aug. 30 breakdown of OpenAI's agentic tier, which the company announced on July 9 and has been rapidly developing since.

Work Cloud runs on chatgpt.com and the mobile apps. Work Local is the desktop app, formerly called Codex, that can reach into local files and programs. Both sit behind the same paywall: the tier is gated to subscribers paying $20 a month or higher, and free and $8-a-month Go users are shut out.

OpenAI's own guidance on when to pick it is flat: 'Use Chat when you want an answer, explanation, brainstorm, or short draft. Use ChatGPT Work when you want ChatGPT to complete a task with a clear outcome.'

What Work stacks on top of Chat is a full agentic runtime. Willison lists model choices across GPT-5.6 Sol, Luna and Terra with reasoning levels running from Light up to Ultra, plus GPT-5.5 at Light through Extra High. It ships a code execution environment that, in his words, 'can now talk to the rest of the internet!', a headless Chrome for loading pages and running JavaScript, a persistent filesystem shared across sessions, sub-agents, scheduled prompts, and the ability to deploy sites on Cloudflare Workers with D1 and R2 attached. He says he is already maintaining 171 folders in his own Work scratch space and counts 223 registered tools, six of them from his own MCP servers.

He is unhappy about what OpenAI has not published. The system prompts and tool descriptions are withheld, and he keeps returning to his 'lethal trifecta' framing of private data, exposure to untrusted content, and outbound communication in the same session, which Work now bundles by default. Three writers in our directory posted the link within hours of publication.