↓Skip to main content
Zeitgeist — a spike by Chris Gathercole
  1. Creators/
  2. Simon Willison — Creator of Datasette; co-creator of Django/

Understanding ChatGPT Work

Blog · Watch/Read · (gathered 2026-09-03)

  • Simon Willison argues that OpenAI’s “ChatGPT Work” is a powerful but “extraordinarily confusing” product, which he aims to demystify by detailing its actual features beyond OpenAI’s vague descriptions.
  • ChatGPT Work (specifically “Work Cloud”) offers significant capabilities over regular Chat, including internet-enabled code execution, a full headless Chrome browser, a persistent and shared filesystem, and the ability to deploy “ChatGPT Sites” via Cloudflare Workers.
  • Work exposes a vast array of internal “tools” (223) and “skills” (44) like web.run and control-browser, which enable its advanced functionality, but these are not officially documented by OpenAI, forcing users to reverse-engineer its capabilities.
  • Willison raises concerns about the safety of ChatGPT Work, applying his “lethal trifecta model” due to its combination of private data access, exposure to untrusted content, and potential for information exfiltration, urging OpenAI for better security explanations.