Matthias Bastian

OpenAI is opening up API access to its deep research models, giving developers tools like automated web search, data analysis, MCP, and code execution. The deep research versions of o3 and o4-mini, already used in ChatGPT, are now available through the API for tasks that require up-to-date information and advanced reasoning. Web search is also supported by models like o3, o3-pro, and o4-mini. Pricing starts at $10 per 1,000 calls for reasoning web search, while the price for GPT-4o and GPT-4.1 web search has dropped to $25 per 1,000 calls.

Another addition is webhooks, which automatically notify developers when a task is complete, so there’s no need to keep checking the status. OpenAI suggests using webhooks for longer-running jobs like deep research, since they can improve reliability.

Microsoft is being sued by several authors who say their books were used without permission to train a Megatron model. The lawsuit, filed in federal court in New York, claims Microsoft used a dataset of about 200,000 pirated books to build a system that mimics the style, voice, and themes of the original works. The plaintiffs are asking for a ban on further use and up to $150,000 in damages per title.

Courts in similar cases involving Meta and Anthropic have said such use may qualify as "transformative" under fair use rules. But it is still unclear if using pirated books overrides fair use, or if scraping copyrighted content from the internet is considered legal and to which extent, and whether this harms the market for the original books, which could prevent the use from being considered fair use.