Feel like your team’s group chat is a bit lifeless? Remote coworkers not really collaborating as well as they should be? There’s a new way to stir the pot now that OpenAI has piloted ChatGPT group chats: cram a chatbot into the conversation and let it chime in whenever it thinks it should.
Where there are chatty bots, there’s OpenAI, naturally, which on Thursday announced the pilot of group chats in ChatGPT. The new feature is now available for mobile and web users logged into ChatGPT, be they free, Go, Plus, or Pro users – but don’t go trying to suck your friends and coworkers into a ChatGPT group chat unless you’re in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, or Taiwan, as those are the only places getting access to the pilot.
OpenAI is pushing the new group chat feature as a way for people to collaborate at work and school, as well as a way for friends to make decisions on things like dinner destinations, vacations, and the like. Search, image and file uploading, image generation, and voice dictation are all included in group chats with ChatGPT, powered by GPT-5.1 Auto, which automatically shunts requests to the best model (i.e., instant, thinking, or a legacy model for free tier users) for the task.
According to OpenAI, ChatGPT will always be listening to discussions, but “decides when to respond and when to stay quiet based on the context of the group conversation.” It’ll still automatically reply if a user mentions ChatGPT, however.
That said, it seems like there are some cumbersome elements of this initial ChatGPT group-chat pilot, for instance, how it handles when new users are added to an existing group chat.
“When you add someone to an existing chat, ChatGPT creates a copy of your conversation as a new group chat so your original conversation stays separate,” OpenAI said. In other words, prepare for the group chat section in the ChatGPT app and web client sidebar to get cluttered very quickly if users are frequently joining conversations in progress.
If ChatGPT users are hoping to share their personally-tweaked bots with memories based on interaction history with others, that’s too bad as well: OpenAI said that personal ChatGPT memory isn’t used in group chats, and that’s a two-way street – one’s personal ChatGPT won’t create new memories based on group conversations either. It’s a totally isolated copy of the bot for now, though OpenAI said it’s “exploring offering more granular controls” to enable the sharing of ChatGPT memory in group chats, so don’t worry – you’ll be able to broadcast your delusions to others soon enough.
There was no mention of when the ChatGPT group-chat feature will come to other regions (we asked but didn’t hear back), with the company only saying that it’s going to “learn how people use ChatGPT together” to determine how it expands the initiative or what sort of collaborative AI features come next.
That’s right: “group chats are just the beginning of ChatGPT becoming a shared space to collaborate and interact with others,” OpenAI said. Goodbye, Google Workspace; hello to another place for an AI giant to cram its tools into a space previously reserved for human interaction. ®