The generous one: OpenAI is giving 100,000 academic researchers free access to its frontier models through 2027, Axios reported. Free frontier access for scientistsResearchers get GPT-5.6 Sol Pro, OpenAI’s top model, and can each invite up to four collaborators, the company said. Sceptics note the flywheel: hook researchers on a capped compute budget, learn from what they do, and keep the frontier compute in-house. Cheaper inference lets OpenAI give models away at the top of the funnel, to 100,000 scientists and to the other 990 million ChatGPT users it wants on agents. Free frontier tools deepen the field’s dependence on one company’s stack, at the exact moment OpenAI is learning to run that stack for less.