OpenAI ships ChatGPT Images 2.5, cutting generation latency up to 50% and adding a sketch-to-image tool
The update ships two new API models -- Flare and Sunburst -- and rolls out to every ChatGPT tier, including free accounts, rather than being reserved for paid plans.
OpenAI released ChatGPT Images 2.5 on September 8, an update to its in-app image generator that the company says "reduced image generation latency by up to 50% compared with Images 2.0." Beyond speed, OpenAI is claiming sharper detail, more natural lighting and texture, better preservation of subjects pulled from reference photos, and more reliable instruction-following across multiple rounds of edits in the same conversation.
What's new beyond the speed claim
The headline addition is Sketch, a tool that turns a drawing made directly inside ChatGPT into a reference image the model then builds from -- a workflow that didn't exist in the 2.0 generation. OpenAI paired it with new templates for common image formats, inline comments on generated images, and a prompt-sharing feature that lets one user's prompt be picked up and reused by others. On the developer side, the release ships two API models: GPT-Image-2.5 Flare, the default, optimized for the lower latency figure OpenAI is advertising, and GPT-Image-2.5 Sunburst, which trades generation time for more precise editing control.
Rolling out to free accounts, not gated behind Pro
Images 2.5 is available now across ChatGPT, ChatGPT for work, and inside Codex, on web, desktop and mobile -- and, notably, across every ChatGPT plan rather than held back for paying subscribers first. That's a different rollout pattern than OpenAI's other major release this month: GPT-6 Astra, which launched September 3 and whose demand OpenAI says has since forced it to pause new sign-ups to the $200 Pro tier entirely. Shipping a flagship image upgrade to free users the same week compute is tight enough to close a paid tier suggests OpenAI is treating image generation and Astra's heavier compute-use features as separate capacity pools, not competing for the same constrained resource.