OpenAI GPT-5.2 Release Notes

OpenAI has introduced GPT-5.2, a model series designed for professional knowledge work. The release includes three variants—GPT-5.2 Instant, GPT-5.2 Thinking, and GPT-5.2 Pro—which collectively improve upon general intelligence, long-context understanding, agentic tool-calling, and vision capabilities.

Professional Knowledge Work and GDPval

GPT-5.2 Thinking is the first OpenAI model to perform at or above a human expert level on GDPval, a benchmark measuring well-specified knowledge work tasks across 44 occupations. It beats or ties top industry professionals on 70.9% of comparisons.

Key performance metrics for professional tasks include:

  • Efficiency: GPT-5.2 Thinking produces outputs at over 11x the speed and at less than 1% of the cost of expert professionals.
  • Financial Modeling: On internal junior investment banking analyst spreadsheet tasks, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 68.4%, a 9.3% increase over GPT-5.1's 59.1%.
  • Deliverables: The model shows improved sophistication in generating workforce planning models, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Software Engineering and Coding

GPT-5.2 Thinking establishes a new state of the art in software engineering, scoring 55.6% on SWE-Bench Pro (which tests four languages) and 80% on SWE-bench Verified.

Technical improvements in coding include:

  • End-to-End Execution: Increased reliability in debugging production code, implementing feature requests, and refactoring large codebases.
  • Front-End Development: Enhanced capabilities in unconventional UI work and 3D elements.
  • Agentic Integration: Early testers, including Windsurf CEO Jeff Wang, noted that GPT-5.2 represents a significant leap in agentic coding, enabling the collapse of fragile multi-agent systems into single "mega-agents."

Long-Context Reasoning and Vision

GPT-5.2 Thinking achieves near 100% accuracy on the 4-needle MRCR variant for contexts up to 256k tokens, making it substantially more accurate than GPT-5.1 for deep document analysis.

Vision capabilities have also been upgraded:

  • Error Reduction: Error rates for chart reasoning and software interface understanding have been reduced by approximately half.
  • Spatial Awareness: The model demonstrates a stronger grasp of relative layout and element positioning within images, such as identifying components on a motherboard.
  • Interface Understanding: On ScreenSpot-Pro, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 86.3% (with Python enabled), compared to 64.2% for GPT-5.1 Thinking.

Mathematics, Science, and Abstract Reasoning

GPT-5.2 Pro and Thinking are positioned as leading models for scientific acceleration:

  • GPQA Diamond: GPT-5.2 Pro achieved 93.2% and GPT-5.2 Thinking achieved 92.4% on this graduate-level science benchmark.
  • FrontierMath: GPT-5.2 Thinking set a new state of the art on Tier 1–3 tasks, solving 40.3% of problems.
  • Competition Math: Both Pro and Thinking versions achieved 100% on AIME 2025.
  • ARC-AGI: GPT-5.2 Pro is the first model to cross the 90% threshold on ARC-AGI-1 (Verified) at 90.5%. On the more difficult ARC-AGI-2 (Verified), GPT-5.2 Pro reached 54.2%.

Tool Calling and Factuality

GPT-5.2 Thinking achieves 98.7% on Tau2-bench Telecom, demonstrating high reliability in multi-turn tool usage. It also outperforms GPT-5.1 and GPT-4.1 in reasoning when reasoning.effort='none' is set for latency-sensitive cases.

Regarding factuality, responses with errors were 30% relatively less common in GPT-5.2 Thinking compared to GPT-5.1 Thinking when using maximum reasoning effort and search tools.

Model Variants and Availability

OpenAI has deployed three distinct versions of the model to match different user needs:

Model Primary Use Case Key Characteristic
GPT-5.2 Instant Everyday work, learning, and translation Fast, conversational, and clear explanations
GPT-5.2 Thinking Complex coding, long-doc synthesis, and math Deep reasoning and polished output
GPT-5.2 Pro High-difficulty questions and programming Smartest, most trustworthy, higher latency

API Pricing and Access

GPT-5.2 is available via the Responses API and Chat Completions API.

  • Naming: gpt-5.2 (Thinking), gpt-5.2-chat-latest (Instant), and gpt-5.2-pro (Pro).
  • Pricing: $1.75 per 1M input tokens and $14 per 1M output tokens (with a 90% discount on cached inputs).
  • Reasoning Effort: Pro and Thinking models now support a fifth reasoning effort level: xhigh.

Safety and Content Protection

GPT-5.2 implements "safe completion" research to balance helpfulness with safety boundaries. Improvements were made to responses involving mental health distress, self-harm, and emotional reliance.

Additionally, OpenAI is rolling out an age prediction model to automatically apply content protections for users under 18. For mental health evaluations, GPT-5.2 Thinking scored 0.963 on self-harm and 0.915 on mental health benchmarks, compared to 0.684 for GPT-5.1 Thinking.

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