UNSW has signed an agreement with OpenAI for 10,000 ChatGPT Edu licences for staff to use in research, teaching and operations. Financial terms were not disclosed.
The agreement with OpenAI announced Thursday follows a ten-month pilot with around 800 staff that showed strong uptake, with almost all staff wanting to continue using the AI tool, according to UNSW.
UNSW vice-chancellor and president Professor Attila Brungs said the full rollout was about providing staff with secure and practical tools while keeping responsibility front of mind.
“This agreement follows our successful trials and will give our UNSW community access to secure, practical tools that can support their work, whilst ensuring they can be used responsibly and in line with our values,” he said.
“As we introduce these technologies, our focus is on helping staff explore how AI can add value in teaching, research and operations, while maintaining the trust of our community.”
A UNSW spokeswoman declined to say how much the university is spending on the licences, which will be delivered for the enterprise version of ChatGPT.
The enterprise product offers additional privacy and security protections that include prohibiting the disclosure of prompts or using users’ data to train OpenAI’s broader models.
UNSW said it would provide training and guidelines to ensure responsible use, and would stage the rollout to manage adoption. The university will also purchase verified carbon offsets for the emissions associated with the service.
Chief information officer Dr Chrissy Burns said the pilots had shown both enthusiasm and creativity from staff.
“Our community have been experimenting with bots, role play, case studies, and synthetic data sets,” she said.
“This is about supporting innovation while also being very deliberate in how we build skills and safeguards around AI use at scale.”
The announcement builds on the initial partnership between UNSW and OpenAI in December 2024, one of the first OpenAI tie-ups in the Asia-Pacific with explicit safeguards to protect intellectual property.
At the time, the university stressed that work by staff and students would not be used to train OpenAI’s models without consent, and positioned the project as part of a broader strategy to embed AI across all disciplines.
This new agreement takes UNSW from pilot projects to large-scale deployment, with a staged rollout intended to spread the use of AI tools more widely while setting clear expectations for ethical and secure use.
Earlier this year the state audit office found AI is being deployed across NSW universities without central oversight, policies or strategies, leaving several institutions without a “complete understanding” of their use. The audit did not identify which individual institutions were struggling the most.
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