Sign in with ChatGPT: OpenAI launches its first cross-platform identity system

On 2 August 2026, OpenAI quietly stepped into territory previously held by Google, Apple, and Microsoft: digital identity. The company launched Sign in with ChatGPT in beta, a feature that lets you use your ChatGPT account to authenticate into supported third-party applications, with no separate account creation required.

The initial wave of supported partners covers a significant slice of the modern developer stack: Airtable, GitLab, HubSpot, Notion, Supabase, and Vercel. The feature works both from within ChatGPT’s plugin directory and directly on those partners’ own websites.

What it actually does

The mechanic is straightforward. When you connect a supported app from ChatGPT’s plugin directory, you can choose “Sign in with ChatGPT” rather than going through a separate registration flow. On participating partner sites, the same button appears alongside the usual Google or Apple sign-in options.

Under the hood, it runs on the same OAuth 2.0 and OpenID Connect protocol stack that powers Google and Apple sign-in. If you have ever connected a third-party app using one of those, the experience is technically identical. The difference is which account sits at the centre of the flow.

When you authenticate, the partner application receives three pieces of information: your name, your email address, and your profile picture if you have one. Each plugin’s broader data access still requires a separate review and approval step, and you can revoke connections at any time from the partner’s dashboard.

What this means for you

If you regularly spin up projects inside ChatGPT or Codex that touch tools like Supabase or Vercel, the friction reduction is real. As Supabase describes it, connecting is now a click and a confirmation rather than a tab-switch to create credentials somewhere else.

For most people, the practical benefit is modest but meaningful: one fewer password to manage, one fewer account setup to abandon halfway through. The sign-in step has always been a small but genuine point of friction when trying a new tool from inside an AI workflow. This removes it.

For enterprise users, the picture is more nuanced. When you sign in with ChatGPT inside an organisation, your Codex usage follows your existing ChatGPT workspace permissions, role-based access controls, and any data residency settings your organisation has configured. Enterprise global admins have two controls available to manage the feature as an identity-provider option. Whether a member of an organisation can use Sign in with ChatGPT at all depends on admin settings, so if it does not appear for you, that is the first place to check.

The privacy detail worth knowing

One comparison that has come up is with Apple’s equivalent feature, which uses an email privacy relay. Apple gives each partner a unique masked email address, so the partner never sees your real one and cross-platform account linking by email is not possible.

OpenAI’s implementation shares your real email address by default. That is worth knowing before you use it widely, particularly if you prefer to keep your email compartmentalised across services. OpenAI also retains technical information about the sign-in flow itself, including IP address, browser version, user agent, and device identifiers, which is standard practice for authentication systems but worth being aware of.

A bigger shift than it looks

The six launch partners are not a random selection. GitLab handles source control, Vercel handles frontend deployment, Supabase handles backend databases and authentication, HubSpot handles CRM and marketing automation, Notion handles documentation and knowledge management, and Airtable handles no-code data. Together they represent a meaningful portion of the tooling that developers and small teams use to build and ship products.

By placing itself as the sign-in layer across this stack, OpenAI is doing something structurally significant. Google and Apple built their identity products to keep users inside their ecosystems and gather signal about how their accounts are used across the web. OpenAI now has the same opportunity. Every partner integration is a data point about what users are building and which tools they reach for.

OpenAI has published an interest form for app developers who want to integrate Sign in with ChatGPT. Preliminary integration work had already begun through Codex CLI, the open-source coding tool, where developers could link ChatGPT accounts with API services. That groundwork made the beta possible at launch.

One technical note for Codex users specifically: when you authenticate via API key rather than Sign in with ChatGPT, Codex uses standard API pricing rather than any credits included in your ChatGPT plan. For programmatic workflows such as CI/CD pipelines, the API key route remains the appropriate one.

What comes next

The beta is live globally for authenticated ChatGPT users, including those in Enterprise organisations, and is also available on OpenAI Academy and Codex Sites. The six named partners are the start, not the ceiling. OpenAI is clearly gathering feedback from this cohort before expanding the integration list further.

For now, Sign in with ChatGPT is a convenient feature for people already embedded in the ChatGPT workflow. Over time, if the partner list grows substantially, it becomes something more structurally important: a login layer that reaches across a large portion of the software tools people use to work.