OpenAI said on November 3 that ChatGPT and Codex are being used for mechanical design, electrical engineering and simulation work — creating and revising CAD models, designing printed circuit boards, preparing manufacturing drawings, configuring simulations and reviewing designs. The company announced the work in a thread on X and a same-day post on its site, with Chip Ganassi Racing and Mazda among the partners named.

OpenAI's own teams are the headline user: its hardware and infrastructure groups use the tools for robotics and compute-infrastructure design, and model usage by those teams has risen 23-fold since February, measured in tokens. In one internal example, two employees used GPT-6 Astra to design a test device in under a week as a side project, and a contract manufacturer produced a small prototype batch in under a month.

The bounds matter: the 23-fold figure is usage, not a measured productivity gain, and OpenAI's own prototype still required human correction on tolerances and assembly. This is a move from software production into work where errors carry manufacturing costs, with human review still required — not a claim that the models design hardware unsupervised.