Synopsys, OpenAI Sign Multi-Year Deal to Develop GPT-Synopsys Model

Synopsys and OpenAI announced a strategic partnership on September 30, 2026, signing a multi-year agreement to jointly develop GPT-Synopsys, a specialized AI model designed to operate Synopsys’ electronic design automation (EDA) tools across semiconductor design workflows.

Under the agreement, the companies will collaborate as preferred partners to develop and deliver GPT-Synopsys, combining OpenAI’s frontier AI with Synopsys’ EDA tools and chip design expertise, according to the joint announcement, which carried a San Francisco and Sunnyvale, California dateline. The announcement casts the partnership as pairing OpenAI’s advanced AI capabilities with Synopsys’ EDA tools and agentic AI capabilities. OpenAI will license Synopsys’ EDA tools for development of the specialized model. The deal also includes a revenue-sharing arrangement and joint go-to-market collaboration to make GPT-Synopsys available to customers worldwide, and the companies said they will cooperate closely on research and development under a shared revenue framework.

Synopsys president and CEO Sassine Ghazi said the future of semiconductor engineering requires faster chip design without compromising power, performance and area (PPA) or first-time-right silicon. “This agreement will expand access to Synopsys’ advanced design capabilities and the underlying, ground-truth engineering tools required to bring increasingly complex chips to market,” Ghazi said in the joint announcement. He said the partnership is aimed at helping more companies develop and accelerate advanced silicon while maintaining the rigor and trust required for manufacturing success.

How GPT-Synopsys Is Designed to Work

In current chip-design workflows, agentic AI technologies connect general-purpose models to EDA tools. The companies describe the partnership’s next step as making frontier models experts in using those tools: learning to run them as expert engineers would, interpreting their outputs, and iteratively optimizing designs. The intended result, the companies said, is a model that acts as a native expert user, letting engineers explore more design alternatives, optimize PPA, and rapidly deliver more sophisticated designs.

GPT-Synopsys is built to reason about chip design and verification and to directly operate Synopsys’ tools. Engineers will delegate design objectives, from PPA optimization to timing and verification closure, while agents run the tools, interpret results, implement changes, and iterate toward verified outcomes that engineers then review.

Deployment, Integration and Data Protections

GPT-Synopsys will run on OpenAI-hosted infrastructure and is designed to interoperate with customer agent harness systems. It will be deeply integrated with Synopsys.ai and the Synopsys Autopilot agentic AI platform. Early technology engagements are underway with leading semiconductor customers, the companies said.

The joint service offering will bundle compute, the model, and licenses while protecting customer-specific design data. According to the announcement, GPT-Synopsys will feature enterprise-grade security, governance, and access controls. Customer data is not used to train the model, is encrypted at rest and in transit, and can be managed through configurable retention, audit, and permission controls.

OpenAI president and co-founder Greg Brockman said OpenAI is using its most advanced technology to improve the systems that power AI, and that the Synopsys collaboration brings that work to chip design. He said the effort is meant to help engineers explore more designs and reach a working chip faster, and that better chips would in turn let OpenAI build better AI for more people.

The Autopilot Platform Named for Integration

Synopsys detailed the Autopilot platform in a separate announcement on September 28, 2026, introducing AgentEngineer solutions, a portfolio of domain-specific long-horizon agents that reason, plan, and execute engineering workflows across verification, system validation, implementation, analog, manufacturing, and simulation and analysis domains. Task-level agents apply Synopsys engineering expertise to targeted execution, including autonomous coverage closure, software bring-up and validation, multi-die 3DIC assembly, PPA closure, analog layout synthesis and design migration, and mask synthesis.

Synopsys describes the Autopilot Platform as an open and secure foundation for autonomous engineering that provides orchestration, skills, memory, telemetry, and governance, with an architecture giving customers choice across Synopsys, partner, and third-party models, infrastructure, tools, and agents. The platform’s context intelligence combines domain engineering knowledge with reusable skills and persistent memory to guide workflows, Synopsys said, and the company said the platform protects customer, partner, and Synopsys intellectual property through access controls, encryption, and runtime guardrails.

Synopsys said more than 50 engagements are underway with AgentEngineer solutions and the Autopilot Platform, with availability planned for the end of 2026.