What Is ChatGPT Sites? OpenAI's Codex Can Now Build and Host Apps (2026)

TL;DR. OpenAI's new ChatGPT Sites lets you describe a web app in plain English and have Codex build it, deploy it, and host it at a shareable URL — dashboards, trackers, internal tools, review workspaces. It launched June 2, 2026, in preview for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise only (not Free, Plus, Go, or Pro). It's the same idea as Claude Artifacts, but with the opposite access model: Sites is locked to business tiers, while Artifacts is on every Claude plan including Free. If you're an individual, the takeaway is "this is where things are headed"; if you run a team on ChatGPT, it's usable today.

For two years, "ask AI to build me an app" meant copying code out of a chat window and figuring out where to host it yourself. OpenAI just closed that gap. At its June 2, 2026 "Intelligence at Work" event, it announced Sites — a Codex feature that builds a working web app and hosts it for you, returning a link your team can open and use.

Here's what's actually live, who can use it, and how it stacks up against the closest thing the other major AI vendors offer.

What ChatGPT Sites actually is

Sites is not a new app or a new subscription. It's a capability inside Codex — OpenAI's agent for coding and everyday work, which now lives directly inside ChatGPT.

The workflow is the part that's new. You describe what you want — "a dashboard that tracks our Q3 launch tasks," "an internal analytics portal," "a customer review workspace," "a knowledge base for onboarding" — and Codex builds the full application, deploys it to OpenAI-managed hosting, and returns a shareable URL. Access to that URL is enforced through Sign in with ChatGPT, so only people in your workspace can open it.

OpenAI is positioning this as a work-product publishing surface, not a website builder in the Squarespace sense. The intended outputs are interactive and usable: dashboards, planners, project boards, galleries, scenario planners, lightweight internal tools — things a team opens, contributes to, and makes decisions in. Not static brochures.

It arrived alongside a broader Codex push: six role-specific plugins (OpenAI describes them as bundling 62 business apps and 110 automated skills) and expanded annotations that now work on documents, spreadsheets, and slides — not just code. The throughline is OpenAI repositioning Codex from a developer tool into something knowledge workers use. The company says more than 5 million people use Codex weekly, and that non-developers — analysts, marketers, operators, researchers — are about 20% of users and growing more than 3x as fast as developers.

Who can use it (and who can't, yet)

This is the most important line for most people reading this:

• ChatGPT Business — Sites is enabled by default.
• ChatGPT Enterprise — available, but an admin must turn it on through role-based access control.
• ChatGPT Free, Plus, Go, and Pro — not available at launch.

So if you pay for ChatGPT Plus or Pro out of your own pocket, Sites isn't something you can try right now. It's a preview aimed squarely at companies.

The guardrails

Because Sites publishes hosted, shareable apps, OpenAI put explicit limits in the terms:

• No payment-card data.
• No protected health information (PHI).
• No sites intended for users under 13.
• It's governed by separate ChatGPT Sites Terms, and it's a preview — expect changes.

For anyone handling client PII, health data, or payments, the right read is: don't route sensitive workflows through a preview publishing feature, and check your organization's AI-use policy before publishing anything internal.

How it compares to Claude, Gemini, and Canvas

Sites isn't happening in a vacuum. "Let AI build me a shareable, interactive thing at a URL" is now a feature all three major vendors offer in some form — but the access models differ sharply.

• Claude Artifacts is the closest direct comparison. Anthropic added the ability to build and share AI-powered apps as Artifacts in 2025, and through 2026 added persistent storage (up to 20MB per artifact), MCP integrations, and "Live Artifacts" that refresh with current data. The key contrast: Artifacts is available on every plan, including Free. You click Publish and get a claude.ai link that anyone can open and use without an account. And the economics are notable — when someone uses your published app, their Claude subscription is billed for the usage, not yours. (On Team and Enterprise, sharing is internal-only.)
• ChatGPT Canvas is a different tool that sometimes gets confused with Sites. Canvas is an in-chat surface for editing documents and code side-by-side with the model — available on consumer tiers. It edits; Sites builds and hosts.
• OpenAI's Wix integration lets ChatGPT users spin up a marketing-style website through Wix's builder — a more traditional "make me a website" path that doesn't require Business/Enterprise.
• Google leans on Canvas-style and Gemini-app surfaces rather than a direct "deploy a hosted internal app" equivalent at this writing.

The honest summary of the availability picture: Sites is the more company-shaped feature — OpenAI-hosted apps behind a workspace sign-in — but it's locked to Business and Enterprise. Claude Artifacts is the one an individual can reach today, across every tier including Free, with public links. Which matters more depends entirely on who you are.

If you're deciding which agentic workspace to live in more broadly — Codex versus Claude's professional tools — that's a bigger question than this one feature, and we cover it in Codex vs Claude Cowork for Professionals.

What this means for you right now

If you're on a ChatGPT Business or Enterprise team: Sites is worth a real look for the internal tools you'd otherwise never get engineering time for — a tracker, a dashboard, a review workspace. It's preview-stage, so treat it as a pilot, not production, and keep regulated data out.

If you're an individual on Plus, Pro, or Free: You can't use Sites yet, but you can use Claude Artifacts today to build and publish an interactive app — including on the Free tier. If your goal is "I want to make a small shareable tool this afternoon," that's the path that's actually open to you right now.

If you handle sensitive client data: The terms already rule out payments and PHI, and it's a preview. Wait for general availability and clear guidance before putting anything sensitive near it.

If you're just tracking where AI is going: Sites is a clear signal. The frontier is shifting from "AI writes you some code" to "AI ships you a running app." Whether you're paying OpenAI or Anthropic, that capability is becoming a standard part of the toolkit — and it's worth knowing what your plan does and doesn't include.

Sources

• OpenAI: Codex for every role, tool, and workflow
• Neowin: OpenAI brings Codex to ChatGPT and introduces shareable interactive Sites
• Digg: OpenAI launches Sites to turn Codex plain-text instructions into hosted, interactive web applications
• Anthropic: Build and share AI-powered apps with Claude
• Claude Help Center: Publishing and sharing artifacts