Microsoft Now Offers Free Access to OpenAI's GPT-5 Model with Copilot on Windows 11 — Alongside Github, Visual Studio, And More

OpenAI's much-hyped GPT-5 model is available now, and if you're a Microsoft Copilot user, you can get it for free.

Today on Microsoft's website, the firm announced that OpenAI's "best AI model to date," GPT-5, is being directly integrated immediately into a variety of Microsoft AI products, including Microsoft Copilot — all for free.

You can get Copilot integrated in practically every Microsoft product these days, including Bing.com's website, Microsoft Edge, and even Outlook. On Windows 11, you can download Microsoft Copilot as an app from the Microsoft Store, and begin immediately working with AI to search the web, generate content, and much more. You can try it right now over at this website: copilot.microsoft.com.

To use GPT-5 on Microsoft Copilot, you simply need to hit the drop down menu in the search query box, as shown below.

Today Microsoft is incorporating GPT-5, OpenAI’s best AI system to date, into a wide variety of its products, to bring new reasoning capabilities and improvements to coding and chat across its platforms," Microsoft explained. "GPT-5, which was trained on Azure, includes OpenAI’s latest reasoning models, along with a smart, efficient model, to provide users with the right tool for the task at hand, whether in a consumer, enterprise or developer context."

Microsoft says that both 365 Copilot business and Copilot consumer customers can access GPT-5 immediately through the associated apps. GPT-5 is supposedly more context-aware than previous models, and has a deeper understanding of technical knowledge, human language cues like sarcasm, and is more efficient as well.

Microsoft is also integrated GPT-5 into programming applications it runs as well, such as Github and Visual Studio, allowing users to produce agentic workflows that automate tasks with greater effectiveness. Azure AI Foundry will also get GPT-5 today, offering "enterprise grade security, compliance, and privacy protections" according to Redmond.

According to Microsoft, GPT-5 is better at understanding more complex tasks and is able to keep track of longer conversations and maintain contextual awareness through multiple prompts. Using Microsoft 365 Copilot, GPT-5 can (with permission) access emails, documents, and files as well, and respond to and action queries based on that data. GPT-5 will be integrated into Copilot Studio for building custom agents, which has been tested in applications to taking over computers and perform tasks that might require actual user input.

Is GPT-5 living up to the hype?!

OpenAI and CEO Sam Altman have been teasing GPT-5 for weeks, which the firm says represents a major leap in efficiency and usability for the platform.

ChatGPT has already begun to totally upend the way the internet works, with search traffic being replaced by AI queries en masse, as entire industries transition away from human workers to artificial intelligence prompts.

As AI gets exponentially more powerful and complex, Microsoft claims that its "AI Red Team" has ensured that GPT-5 is limited in the potential harms it can wrought. GPT-5 has been tested against "rigorous" security protocols, preventing it from generating illegal content such as malware programming, scam automation, and illegal images. You have to wonder just how far Microsoft and other tech firms will be able to retain control over artificial intelligence platforms as they get more powerful and become adapted by bad actors, including nation states, who would use the technology to ultimately do harm.

Either way, even in the few minutes I've dabbled with it, GPT-5 has managed to defeat issues I found with previous models, particularly from Copilot itself. Previously, Copilot seemed to have an issue parsing large screenshots that contained data tables, for example, but GPT-5 seems to have no issue whatsoever — while also being far faster.

Could GPT-5 be a game changer, again? Have you tried it? Let us know what you think.