OpenAI boosted ChatGPT’s Google Drive plug-in last week with a new capability that lets the chatbot access and edit Drive files and folders within the chatbot window.
The update began rolling out on Aug. 13 and is available for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Enterprise, Edu, Healthcare, and Business subscribers on the web. At launch, the feature will support files and folders in My Drive as well as those shared directly with you, OpenAI says in its release notes.
To get started, select Plugins from the left-side panel in ChatGPT and ensure the Google Drive plug-in is installed. After that, you can browse all your supported Drive files from ChatGPT’s Library and add them to any chat using @mentions or by selecting the **plus (+) **button in the prompt box and selecting Add from Library.
Once you open your files in chat, you can ask ChatGPT “to summarize, analyze, compare, or create something new from them,” OpenAI says. An X user shared an image of the resulting interface, and it shows a prompt box appearing below a Google Docs file.
If you grant necessary permissions, all edits you make from this window will be saved automatically to the original source file in Drive. The updated feature also allows you to select a folder and ask ChatGPT to apply changes to all the files it contains. Google already has its own Gemini AI features available in Drive. OpenAI’s new capabilities just give Drive users who prefer ChatGPT an additional AI assistant to work with.
For now, ChatGPT’s Google Drive updates are only available to paying users on the web. Support for mobile apps “will follow,” OpenAI said without specifying a timeline. OpenAI also launched a Computer History feature on macOS last week that lets ChatGPT record your Mac activity and take actions based on a saved timeline.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, PCMag's parent company, filed a lawsuit against OpenAI in April 2025, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.