OpenAI engineer Thibault Sottiaux (Tibo) said the default context length for GPT-6.1 Sol in the Codex and Work environments has been raised from 272k to 500k tokens, an increase of about 80%; users can still adjust it manually and the model's maximum is 1M. He described 500k as the sweet spot found in testing, saying it should notably reduce how often context compaction is triggered and better handle long tasks that must retain large amounts of detail. Alongside the change, OpenAI will no longer charge a separate long-context fee when usage is deducted from a subscription, while API calls continue to be billed at API rates.