OpenAI Launches GPT-5.2: Three Powerful Variants Redefining Professional AI
OpenAI has officially unveiled GPT-5.2 on December 11, 2025, marking a significant leap forward in the company's pursuit of artificial general intelligence. This release comes as a direct response to intensifying competition from Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5 and Google's Gemini 3, positioning GPT-5.2 as OpenAI's most capable model series to date.
Three Variants, One Mission
Unlike previous releases, GPT-5.2 arrives in three distinct variants, each optimized for different use cases:
| Variant | Optimization | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.2 Instant | Speed & latency | Real-time applications, chatbots, quick queries |
| GPT-5.2 Thinking | Complex reasoning | Structured work, multi-step problems, research |
| GPT-5.2 Pro | Maximum accuracy | Professional knowledge work, critical tasks |
This tiered approach allows developers and enterprises to select the optimal balance of speed, cost, and capability for their specific workflows.
Technical Specifications
GPT-5.2 Pro introduces several groundbreaking improvements:
- 400K Token Context Window - Process entire codebases, legal documents, or research papers in a single prompt
- 128K Max Output Tokens - Generate extensive, detailed responses without truncation
- 38% Error Reduction - Significantly fewer hallucinations and factual mistakes compared to GPT-5
- Enhanced Vision Capabilities - Improved understanding of complex diagrams, charts, and visual content
Benchmark Performance
On the newly introduced SWE-Bench Pro benchmark, designed to test real-world software engineering capabilities, GPT-5.2 Pro achieved state-of-the-art results:
SWE-Bench Pro Results (December 2025):
├── GPT-5.2 Pro: 78.4%
├── Claude Opus 4.5: 80.9%
├── Gemini 3 Pro: 72.1%
└── GPT-5 (previous): 61.2%
While Claude Opus 4.5 maintains a slight edge on this benchmark, GPT-5.2 Pro excels in long-horizon agentic tasks and sustained reasoning chains.
GPT-5.2-Codex: The Coding Specialist
Alongside the main release, OpenAI quietly shipped GPT-5.2-Codex, a specialized variant optimized for:
- Long-horizon coding tasks spanning multiple files and sessions
- Large-scale codebase refactoring
- Cybersecurity analysis and vulnerability detection
- Technical documentation generation
Early reports from enterprise users indicate Codex can maintain context across complex refactoring operations that span days of development work.
Agentic Capabilities
A major focus of GPT-5.2 is its enhanced agentic tool-calling abilities. The model can now:
- Chain multiple tool calls with improved reliability
- Self-correct when tool responses indicate errors
- Maintain coherent plans across hundreds of steps
- Integrate seamlessly with external APIs and databases
Pricing & Availability
GPT-5.2 is available immediately through the OpenAI API:
| Model | Input (per 1M tokens) | Output (per 1M tokens) |
|---|---|---|
| GPT-5.2 Instant | $2.50 | $10.00 |
| GPT-5.2 Thinking | $5.00 | $20.00 |
| GPT-5.2 Pro | $15.00 | $60.00 |
ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers receive access to GPT-5.2 Thinking, while Enterprise customers can access all variants.
Open-Weight Models: GPT-oss
In a surprising move, OpenAI also released GPT-oss-120b and GPT-oss-20b, their first open-weight models:
- Available on Hugging Face under a permissive license
- Designed for on-premise deployment
- Competitive with Llama 4 and Mistral 3
This marks OpenAI's strategic entry into the open-source ecosystem, previously dominated by Meta and Mistral AI.
Industry Impact
The release of GPT-5.2 intensifies the AI model wars heading into 2026. With Anthropic, Google, and xAI all having released major updates in November, the competition for enterprise AI dominance has never been fiercer.
For developers and businesses, the clear winner is choice—with multiple world-class models now available, teams can select the best tool for their specific needs rather than being locked into a single ecosystem.
GPT-5.2 is available now via api.openai.com. Enterprise pricing available upon request.
