Meet Prism, OpenAI’s free research workspace for scientists – how to try it – ZDNET
Meet Prism, OpenAI’s free research workspace for scientists – how to try it
Powered by GPT-5.2, Prism helps you draft papers, source contextualized references, and more – just don’t delegate your research to it.
Written by Radhika Rajkumar, Editor, Jan. 27, 2026 at 10:01 a.m. PT
Table of Contents
How Prism works Limitations The AI workspace future How to access
ZDNET’s key takeaways
- Prism is a free, collaborative AI workspace for research.
- It’s meant to support, not replace, human-led science.
- AI-enabled workspaces aim to unite disparate tools.
This fall, OpenAI deepened its investment in AI for science as the technology’s next frontier, citing advancements in GPT-5 as proof of its viability as a research tool — and eventual scientific automation system. As a first step to that end, OpenAI has launched Prism, a new collaborative workspace for scientists.
“In 2025, AI changed software development forever,” OpenAI said in the announcement. “In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science.”
Also: Inside Google’s vision to make Gmail your personal AI agent command center
Prism is powered by GPT-5.2, the company’s newest model, which was released last month. At the time, OpenAI said GPT-5.2 performs “at or above human expert level,” but the company doesn’t advise you to let it automate your research — here’s why.
(Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET’s parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)
How Prism works
OpenAI has invested heavily in demonstrating scientific use cases for its models, releasing papers on its prowess in mathematical discovery, cell analysis, and biology experiments. But the tools scientists currently use, OpenAI argued in the announcement, constrain “how research is done day to day.” Enter Prism.
Geared toward science writing and report compilation, which requires collaboration amongst several participants, Prism “brings drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace,” OpenAI said, referring to the LaTeX scientific typesetting standard.
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Prism puts GPT-5.2 inside a scientific project, ideally for a more seamless experience. According to OpenAI, it’s based on Crixet, a platform the company purchased and folded into this new release.
In a demo, OpenAI developers walked through Prism’s interface: a chat window on the left and an in-process research paper on the right. Prism lets scientists access multiple chat agents simultaneously, each executing different commands. These can include adding sources from arXiv and other platforms, creating lecture notes based on a topic, complete with citations, or perfecting equations and figures. Users can also test hypotheses with GPT-5.2 Thinking as a copilot, LaTeX-format diagrams, and edit several documents within one project.
Similarly to Claude’s just-released Slack, Asana, and Figma integrations and comparable features in ChatGPT, the goal of Prism and tools like it is to centralize systems for ease of use.
“Much of the everyday work of research — drafting papers, revising arguments, managing equations and citations, and coordinating with collaborators — remains fragmented,” OpenAI said. “Researchers often move between editors, PDFs, LaTeX compilers, reference managers, and separate chat interfaces, losing context and interrupting focus.”
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OpenAI said reasoning models are less likely to hallucinate citations — a primary issue in using AI for research, law, and other academic contexts — because their extended thinking process forces them to review material more closely.
Editor’s Note: Featured image at top from WP AI.
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