OpenAI launched its latest frontier model, GPT-5.2, on Thursday amid increasing competition from Google, pitching it as its most advanced model yet and one designed for developers and everyday professional use. OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 is coming to ChatGPT paid users and developers via the API in three flavors: Instant, a speed-optimized model for routine queries like information-seeking, writing, and translation; Thinking, which excels at complex structured work like coding, analyzing long documents, math, and planning; and Pro, the top-end model aimed at delivering maximum accuracy and reliability for difficult problems. “We designed 5.2 to unlock even more economic value for people,” Fidji Simo, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said Thursday during a briefing with journalists. “It’s better at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, writing code, perceiving images, understanding long context, using tools and then linking complex, multi-step projects.” GPT-5.2 lands in the middle of an arms race with Google’s Gemini 3, which is topping LMArena’s leaderboard across most benchmarks (apart from coding — which Anthropic’s Claude Opus-4.5 still has on lock). Early this month, The Information reported that CEO Sam Altman released an internal “code red” memo to staff amid ChatGPT traffic decline and concerns that it is losing consumer market share to Google. The code red called for a shift in priorities, including stalling on commitments like introducing ads and instead focusing on creating a better ChatGPT experience. GPT-5.2 is OpenAI’s push to reclaim leadership, even as some employees reportedly asked for the model release to be pushed back so the company could have more time to improve it. And despite indications that OpenAI would focus its attention on consumer use cases by adding more personalization and customization to ChatGPT, the launch of GPT-5.2 looks to beef up its enterprise opportunities. The company is specifically targeting developers and the tooling ecosystem, aiming to become the default foundation for building AI-powered applications. Earlier this week, OpenAI released new data showing enterprise usage of its AI tools has surged dramatically over the past year. Techcrunch event San Francisco | October 13-15, 2026 This comes as Gemini 3 has become tightly integrated into Google’s product and cloud ecosystem for multimodal and agentic workflows. Google this week launched managed MCP servers that make its Google and Cloud services like Maps and BigQuery easier for agents to plug into. (MCPs are the connectors between AI systems and data and tools.) OpenAI says GPT-5.2 sets new benchmark scores in coding, math, science, vision, long-context reasoning, and tool use, which the company claims could lead to “more reliable agentic workflows, production-grade code, and complex systems that operate across large contexts and real-world data.” Those capabilities put it in direct competition with Gemini 3’s Deep Think mode, which has been touted as a major reasoning advancement targeting math, logic, and science. On OpenAI’s own benchmark chart, GPT-5.2 Thinking edges out Gemini 3 and Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.5 in nearly every listed reasoning test, from real-world software engineering tasks (SWE-Bench Pro) and doctoral-level science knowledge (GPQA Diamond) to abstract reasoning and pattern discovery (ARC-AGI suites). Research lead Aidan Clark said that stronger math scores aren’t just about solving equations. Mathematical reasoning, he explained, is a proxy for whether a model can follow multi-step logic, keep numbers consistent over time, and avoid subtle errors that could compound over time. “These are all properties that really matter across a wide range of different workloads,” Clark said. “Things like financial modeling, forecasting, doing an analysis of data.” During the briefing, OpenAI product lead Max Schwarzer said GPT-5.2 “makes substantial improvements to code generation and debugging” and can walk through complex math and logic step by step. Coding startups like Windsurf and CharlieCode, he added, report “state-of-the-art agent coding performance” and measurable gains on complex multi-step workflows. Beyond coding, Schwarzer said that GPT-5.2 Thinking responses contain 38% fewer errors than its predecessor, making the model more dependable for day-to-day decision-making, research, and writing. GPT-5.2 appears to be less a reinvention and more of a consolidation of OpenAI’s last two upgrades. GPT-5, which dropped in August, was a reset that laid the groundwork for a unified system with a router to toggle the model between a fast default model and a deeper “Thinking” mode. November’s GPT-5.1 focused on making that system warmer, more conversational, and better suited to agentic and coding tasks. The latest model, GPT-5.2, seems to turn up the dial on all of those