OpenAI Said to Be Expanding Deep Research AI Agent in ChatGPT to Free Tier

OpenAI is said to be planning to expand its Deep Research feature to the users on the free tier of ChatGPT. The feature was introduced in February as an agentic tool that can autonomously conduct multi-step research on complex topics by looking for relevant information on the Internet. Powered by a custom o3 artificial intelligence (AI) model, it is currently only available to the paid subscribers of ChatGPT. Notably, even if Deep Research does make it to the free tier, it is likely to come with high rate limits.

OpenAI Could Expand Deep Research to All Users

Tibor Blaho, Lead Engineer at AIPRM, and an AI enthusiast, shared a screenshot from an OpenAI webcast on X (formerly known as Twitter) highlighting that Deep Research could soon come to ChatGPT's free tier. In the webcast, OpenAI's member of technical staff, Isa Fullford, is said to have confirmed the expansion of the agentic feature. However, no expected date for the expansion was shared.

Separately, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that new releases from the company are going to be delayed due to the increased server load from the new image generation feature's usage. So, even if Deep Research is making its way to the free tier, it is likely not going to be before the company gains control over its capacity issues.

Even if the feature is released to the free tier, it is likely going to have a high rate limit since Deep Research is an agentic tool that requires high GPU processing. As such, users could be limited to a few runs of the feature in a month. Notably, ChatGPT Plus users also have access to the AI agent with rate limits, and higher usage is only available to ChatGPT Pro subscribers, the company's most premium tier.

Deep Research in ChatGPT (not to be confused with the same-name feature in Gemini or Perplexity) is a multi-step research tool that can independently run web searches on a topic and prepare a detailed report to save users time of manual research. At the time of launch, the company said it is built for users who do intensive research-based work in areas such as finance, science, policy, and engineering.