OpenAI AI Updates: April 23, 2026

1. ChatGPT Gets Workspace Agents — Shared, Codex-Powered Automations That Replace Custom GPTs

OpenAI. Workspace agents are shared Codex-backed agents that teams build once and reuse across ChatGPT and Slack to automate multi-step work — preparing reports, writing code, responding to messages — under organization-level permissions. They run in the cloud and keep executing when the user isn’t watching, which is the key difference from prior in-session agent flows. Availability is research preview in Business, Enterprise, Edu, and Teachers plans, free until May 6 and credit-priced afterward. GPTs stay available during the transition and will eventually convert to workspace agents via a tool OpenAI says is coming. Source

2. OpenAI Makes ChatGPT Free for Verified U.S. Clinicians and Ships HealthBench Professional

OpenAI. OpenAI opened a no-cost tier of ChatGPT to verified U.S. physicians, nurse practitioners, physician assistants, and pharmacists, aimed at clinical documentation, care coordination, and evidence-grounded reasoning. Alongside it the company introduced HealthBench Professional, an open benchmark built from real clinician chat tasks, and reported that GPT-5.4 running in the clinician tier outperforms both other models and human physicians on it. The framing deliberately separates the prosumer ChatGPT product from a verified-professional tier whose data handling and defaults are tuned for clinical use. Source

3. Responses API WebSocket Mode Cuts Agentic Round-Trips Roughly 30%

OpenAI. OpenAI published an engineering write-up on the WebSocket mode for the Responses API, which keeps a persistent bidirectional connection to /v1/responses and holds the previous response state in a connection-local cache. Each turn is continued by sending only previous_response_id plus new input items; the server skips reprocessing the full conversation. OpenAI measures roughly 30% faster rollouts for agentic workflows and about 40% faster end-to-end execution for loops with 20+ sequential tool calls. The mode is aimed at Codex-style coding assistants and other long-running, tool-call-heavy agents. Source

4. Codex CLI 0.123.0 Adds a Native Amazon Bedrock Provider

OpenAI. Codex CLI 0.123.0 shipped with an Amazon Bedrock model provider that supports AWS profile-based authentication, opening Codex’s agent harness to Bedrock-hosted models without shimming through a proxy. The release also adds /mcp verbose for deeper MCP diagnostics, transcript-delta support in realtime agent handoffs, and fixes for /copy after rollback and Unicode input on VS Code WSL terminals. Source