OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT’s capabilities with a new group chat feature now piloting across Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan, marking one of the company’s most significant experiments in real-time AI collaboration. The rollout gives users the ability to bring multiple people into a single ChatGPT conversation, enabling shared problem-solving, joint planning, and collective research inside the app.

The feature mirrors how teams already work in messaging platforms, but with an AI model embedded at the center to interpret, generate, and organise information as a shared assistant. Early testers can invite participants into a ChatGPT thread, where the system can help coordinate tasks, generate documents, summarise discussions, or mediate complex brainstorming without leaving the chat interface.

This expansion signals OpenAI’s push to transform ChatGPT from a one-to-one conversational tool into a multi-participant workspace. It also hints at the company’s broader ambitions to position ChatGPT as a core productivity environment, especially as competition intensifies among AI platforms racing to define how people collaborate with artificial intelligence.

Asia was chosen as the pilot region due to high adoption of messaging-driven workflows and strong mobile-first usage patterns. The test will run in parallel with ongoing updates to GPT-5.1, which OpenAI says brings improved reasoning, faster responses, and more customisable conversational styles.

The company has not announced when group chats will roll out globally, but the pilot suggests a larger shift toward AI-powered team collaboration tools that could disrupt both workplace messaging platforms and consumer productivity apps.