OpenAI announced on Thursday that group chats in ChatGPT are now launching globally for all users. This includes people on Free, Go, Plus, and Pro plans. The global rollout follows a one-week pilot of the feature in select regions such as Japan and New Zealand.
This new feature transforms ChatGPT from a one-on-one assistant into a shared space where friends, family, or co-workers can collaborate. Users can work together in a single conversation to plan events, create content, and make decisions. OpenAI envisions group chats as a tool for coordinating trips, co-writing documents, settling debates, or conducting group research, with ChatGPT assisting by searching for information, summarizing discussions, and comparing options.
A group chat can include up to twenty people, provided they have all accepted an invitation to join. The company confirms that each user’s personal settings and memory remain private and are not shared with the group.
To start a group chat, users must tap the people icon and add participants. This can be done either by directly adding people or by sharing an invite link. Each participant will be prompted to set up a short profile containing their name, username, and a photo. It is important to note that adding a new person to an existing chat creates a completely new conversation thread, leaving the original chat history unchanged.
OpenAI states that ChatGPT is designed to understand the flow of a group conversation, knowing when to contribute and when to remain silent. Users can explicitly direct a question to the AI by tagging “ChatGPT” in the chat. Additionally, ChatGPT can react to messages using emojis and can reference the profile photos of the people in the group.
This move represents OpenAI’s latest effort to evolve ChatGPT from a simple chatbot into a more social platform. The company sees group chats as just the beginning of transforming ChatGPT into a collaborative environment rather than a single-player experience. In an email to TechCrunch, OpenAI expressed its vision for ChatGPT to play a more active role in real group conversations, helping people plan, create, and take action together.
This group chat announcement comes less than two weeks after the launch of GPT-5.1, which introduced both Instant and Thinking versions of the model. It also follows the September launch of Sora, a social app from OpenAI where users can generate videos of themselves and their friends to share on a TikTok-style feed.