CHATGPT WORK LAUNCHES FREE WITH GPT 5.6 AND CODEX BUILT IN

I opened the new ChatGPT desktop app at 11am ET and the first thing I noticed was what was missing. The separate Codex icon in my dock was gone. In its place was one app with three tabs: Chat, Work, and Codex, merged into a single window on both Mac and Windows, free for everyone starting today. That is the actual news. Not another model number. A company deciding that asking a user to juggle two apps to get one job done was a bug, not a feature.

ChatGPT Work is OpenAI's new agent, built on Codex and the newly public GPT 5.6, and it is designed to run a whole task instead of answering one prompt at a time. You describe the outcome. You do not outline the steps. Say you want a deck built from three files sitting in your Drive folder, and Work pulls the context, drafts the analysis, and keeps working while you do something else. That is a real behavior change from the copy paste loop most people still run with ChatGPT, where you feed it one chunk at a time and stitch the output together yourself.

GPT 5.6 Is Not One Model. It Is Three Prices.

GPT 5.6 replaces the old single number with three tiers that OpenAI calls Sol, Terra and Luna, and each one is priced differently per million tokens. Sol is the flagship at 5 dollars input and 30 dollars output, the only tier with max reasoning effort unlocked. Terra runs 2.50 and 15, built to match the older GPT 5.5 at half the cost. Luna is the bargain tier at 1 dollar and 6 dollars output, meant for high volume tasks where speed matters more than depth.

The naming choice is the quiet feature nobody is demoing. A version number forces a launch event. A tier name lets OpenAI improve Terra or Luna on its own schedule without you noticing a new release, the same trick Apple pulled when it stopped announcing every A series chip revision by name. Sol, Terra and Luna can each get better independently, and the improvement just shows up in your existing chat window. That is a lock in mechanic disguised as a naming convention.

Free Users Get the App. Not the Brain.

Free and Go accounts only get Terra, the middle tier, when they use ChatGPT Work or Codex. Plus, Pro, Business, Enterprise and Edu accounts can pick between Sol, Terra and Luna and set the reasoning effort themselves, and they get Work on web and mobile the same day as the desktop rollout, not weeks later. So the desktop merger is free and global today, exactly as promised in the launch post, but the model doing your reasoning depends entirely on what you pay. That is the incentive map in one sentence. The habit forming part, the single app that plans your whole workflow, ships to everyone. The part that actually thinks the hardest, Sol, stays behind the 20 dollar Plus wall.

This is not new behavior from OpenAI. When it folded Voice Mode into GPT Live in July, the pattern was the same: widen the free funnel, meter the frontier model. Give away the interface. Charge for the intelligence.

Codex Stopped Being a Separate App Today

The Codex app is gone as a standalone product, absorbed into ChatGPT alongside Chat and Work, and every plan tier including Free can now open it from the same window. That matters more than it sounds. Codex was OpenAI's coding agent, previously walled off from the consumer app, which meant casual users never touched it and developers had to context switch between two logins. One app removes that friction entirely, and it puts a coding agent in front of people who were never going to install a separate developer tool.

Compare that to how Meta handled its own AI hardware push with Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses: different device, same logic. Bundle the AI feature into something the user already has open, rather than asking them to adopt a new destination. OpenAI just did the software version of that inside its own app.

Try It, Skip Sol for Now

Download the app if you already use ChatGPT for real work. The Work tab genuinely changes the task from prompt and wait to describe and walk away, and that is worth learning even on Terra. Skip the Plus upgrade to Sol unless a task is actually failing on Terra first. At 5 dollars input and 30 dollars output per million tokens, Sol is priced for people running production workloads, not for someone who wants a deck built once a week. The free tier already ships the habit change. The 20 dollar tier just ships more horsepower behind it, and most days you will not notice the difference until the task gets hard enough to need it.