OpenAI on Thursday announced its most advanced artificial intelligence model, GPT-5.2, and said it's the best offering yet for everyday professional use. The model is better than predecessors at creating spreadsheets, building presentations, perceiving images, writing code and understanding long context, OpenAI said. It will be available starting Thursday within OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot and its application programming interface (API). The announcement comes weeks after OpenAI launched its GPT-5.1 model. Rivals Anthropic and Google also launched new models last month, prompting OpenAI to declare a "code red" effort to improve ChatGPT and sideline other projects. It's all part of a high-stakes battle among leading tech companies to create the most widely used model as consumers and businesses increasingly add AI into their daily lives and workflow. OpenAI is counting on its GPT family of models to define the future as the company seeks to justify its $500 billion valuation and over $1.4 trillion in planned spending. "We announced this code red to really signal to the company that we want to martial resources in one particular area, and that's a way to really define priorities and define things that can be deprioritized," Fidji Simo, CEO of applications at OpenAI, told reporters in a briefing on Thursday. "We have had an increase in resources focused on ChatGPT in general, I would say that helps with the release of this model, but that's not the reason it's coming out this week in particular." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told CNBC on Thursday that Google's release of its Gemini 3 model had less of an impact on the company's metrics than it originally feared. "I believe that when a competitive threat happens, you want to focus on it, deal with it quickly," Altman said. OpenAI said GPT-5.2 will be available in Instant, Thinking and Pro versions. The company said that the model tops industry benchmarks, including SWE-Bench Pro, which evaluates agentic coding performance, and GPQA Diamond, a graduate-level scientific reasoning benchmark. On GDPval, an evaluation OpenAI released earlier this year, GPT-5.2 beat or tied top industry professionals on 70.9% of well-specified tasks, the company said. "While we are proud that we are able to have a cadence of releasing models fast, this particular integration has been in the works for a while." Anthropic's latest model, Opus 4.5, scores higher than GPT-5.2 on SWE-Bench Verified, a test set that evaluates an AI system's software coding abilities. OpenAI told reporters that the benchmark is less "contamination resistant, challenging, diverse and industrially relevant" than SWE-Bench Pro. More than 800 million people now use its chatbot every week. Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inbox

"Well, we keep it, I guess," Trump told reporters Wednesday during a business roundtable at the White House, hours after the Guyana-flagged Skipper was seized. Matt Smith, head U.S. analyst at energy consulting firm Kpler, told CNBC that Skipper was covertly loaded with 1.1 million barrels of oil in mid-November and appeared to be headed for Cuba. Though the tanker flew Guyana flags, the country's Maritime Administration Department said in a statement on Wednesday that the ship was not registered in Guyana. There's a civil asset forfeiture process," said Bob McNally, founder and president of Rapidan Energy Group and a former White House energy advisor to President George W. Bush. "We expect that to be followed in this case," McNally said. Andy Lipow, president of Lipow Oil Associates, a petroleum analysis firm, told CNBC that the U.S. has seized Iranian oil sold into the U.S. Gulf Coast on multiple occasions in recent years. Lightering is the process of transferring cargo, oil or hazardous materials from one ship to another. "They have done it in the past, will do so again," Lipow said. The Department of Justice and Homeland Security Department did not immediately return requests for comment. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing on Thursday that the vessel is "undergoing a forfeiter process." However, there is a legal process for the seizure of that oil and that legal process will be followed," Leavitt said. Past seizures have resulted in windfalls for the U.S. In 2024, the U.S. seized and sold Iranian oil, generating $47 million in proceeds, some of which could be directed toward the U.S. Victims of State Sponsored Terrorism Fund, according to a statement by the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia earlier this year. Marshals Service also operates an asset forfeiture program that includes managing and selling assets seized by the DOJ. But the Marshals Service is not involved in the Venezuelan seizure, according to an agency spokesperson. Attorney General Pam Bondi, in a post on X on Wednesday, said that the ship had been sanctioned for multiple years because of its "involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations." "Our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues," Bondi wrote. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defended the seizure during testimony at a House hearing on Thursday. "It was a successful operation directed by the president to ensure that we're pushing back on a regime that is systematically covering and flooding our country with deadly drugs and killing our next generation of Americans," Noem told the House Homeland Security Committee. She touted the Coast Guard's efforts to target drug smugglers and "those individuals that are funding it with a shadow fleet of sanctioned oil that should never be sold to benefit their profits and their pockets to kill Americans." We want to hear from you. Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inbox

The Walt Disney Company's $1 billion equity investment in OpenAI will serve as "a way in" to artificial intelligence, which will have a significant long-term impact on Disney's business, Disney CEO Bob Iger told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Thursday. "We think this is a good investment for the company." Disney announced its investment in OpenAI as part of an agreement on Thursday that will allow users to make AI videos with its copyrighted characters on the startup's app called Sora. More than 200 characters, including Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader and Cinderella, will be available on the platform through a three-year licensing agreement, which Iger said would be exclusive to OpenAI at the beginning of the term. As new AI products have exploded into the mainstream, several media companies, including Disney, have taken legal action in an effort to safeguard their intellectual property. Iger said Disney has been "aggressive" at protecting its IP, but he has been "extremely impressed" with OpenAI's growth as well as their willingness to license content. "No human generation has ever stood in the way of technological advance, and we don't intend to try," Iger said. "We've always felt that if it's going to happen, including disruption of our current business models, then we should get on board." Shares of Disney are up more than 1% on Thursday. He said it's important for companies like Disney to understand the importance of user-generated and AI-generated content. "I think it's crucial for a content-creation company, like Disney, to get ahead of that," he said. OpenAI launched Sora in September, and the short-form video app allows people to generate content by simply typing in a prompt. The app quickly rose to the top of Apple's App Store, but as users flooded the platform with videos of popular brands and characters, large media players began to raise concerns around safety and copyright infringement. Iger said Disney's deal with OpenAI "does not in any way represent a threat to creators at all," in part because characters' voices as well as talent names and likenesses are not included. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said there will be guardrails in place around how Disney's characters will be used on Sora. "It's very important that we enable Disney to set and evolve those guardrails over time, but they will of course be in there," Altman told CNBC on Thursday. Sign up for free newsletters and get more CNBC delivered to your inbox

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Gold's record rally this year has grabbed headlines, but American investors barely own any of it, which means the yellow metal's price could have more room to run, according to Goldman Sachs. Even with gold hitting repeated highs, US ownership hasn't budged much. Gold ETF exposure is still six basis points, or 0.06 percentage points, below its 2012 peak since the launch of gold ETFs in the mid-2000s, according to Goldman's analysis published on Wednesday. The low gold allocation is simply because "portfolio growth has outpaced gains in gold prices and volumes over the past decade," Goldman's analysts wrote. And while gold has surged to new all-time highs in 2025, Goldman's analysis shows that the rally hasn't translated into meaningful increases in actual US ownership. Goldman's data also shows that fewer than half of large US institutions managing over $100 million hold any gold ETF position at all. Among those that do, allocations typically sit between 0.1% and 0.5%. For major long-term investors, only about 0.2% of their portfolios are in gold. Despite the social media buzz around Costco gold bars and US Mint coin sales, the report notes that physical gold demand in the US is tiny compared with ETF flows — just 11 to 15 metric tons year-to-date, versus roughly 400 tons of net ETF buying. The gap between those recommendations and reality is exactly what Goldman says could push gold's next leg higher. The bank estimates that every 1-basis-point, or 0.01 percentage point, increase in gold's share of US financial portfolios would push gold prices up by about 1.4%. Goldman argues that if households or institutions meaningfully boosted their gold exposure as a diversifier — especially amid global macro uncertainty, including concerns about the fiscal outlook — such inflows could "substantially raise prices" in the small gold market. The spot gold price hit a record high near $4,400 per troy ounce in late October and has since pulled back to around $4,220 per ounce.

Every time Matthew publishes a story, you'll get an alert straight to your inbox! By clicking “Sign up”, you agree to receive emails from Business Insider. In addition, you accept Insider's Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. A Ukrainian brigade has released footage of one of its uncrewed ground vehicles opening fire on a Russian armored personnel carrier, offering a rare glimpse at the emerging technology in action. The brigade said that the ground-based drone later encountered a Russian MT-LB, a lightly armored fighting vehicle often used to transport infantry. Business Insider could neither independently verify when nor where the footage was filmed. The Droid TW 12.7 is equipped with an M2 Browning machine gun that fires .50 caliber rounds, which would typically pierce an MT-LB's armor. Sparks fly from the armored vehicle's chassis as it slows to a crawl and drifts in front of the UGV, which continues firing point-blank. The MT-LB appears to be aimlessly crawling past the drone, indicating that its driver is incapacitated or its controls are damaged. Wednesday's published footage provides insight into how UGVs are increasingly used on the battlefield in Ukraine, where troops on both sides are experimenting with ground drones to perform missions that human soldiers must otherwise conduct. While official statistics show that uncrewed aerial vehicles still dominated the drone warfare space last month, the spread of UGVs offers a possible future where Kyiv can rely on remotely operated systems for ground operations instead of risking its troops. This year, Ukraine said that it aims to manufacture and deploy at least 15,000 UGVs across the battlefield. Ukrainian and Russian teams have developed hundreds of such systems, ranging from buggies that can ferry provisions near the front lines to trucks outfitted with remotely operated machine guns.