OpenAI: privacy tooling and pricing tweaks

OpenAI is pushing two levers at once: it released a local tool to scrub personal data from text and changed how some ChatGPT ads are billed. (openai.com) (thenextweb.com) The new model, called Privacy Filter, was announced on April 22, 2026 as an open-weight system for detecting and redacting personally identifiable information in text. OpenAI said it can run locally on a user’s machine, so unfiltered data does not need to be sent to a server first. (openai.com) OpenAI said Privacy Filter is designed for “training, indexing, logging, and review pipelines,” and that a fine-tuned version is already used in its own privacy-preserving workflows. The company said the model reached state-of-the-art results on the PII-Masking-300k benchmark after correcting annotation issues in the evaluation set. (openai.com) The product addresses a basic enterprise problem: companies want to use large language models on internal documents, but names, account numbers, and other personal details can make that risky. OpenAI’s pitch is that a smaller model can act like a first-pass editor, masking sensitive text before a larger system ever sees it. (openai.com) (venturebeat.com) At the same time, OpenAI is refining how it charges for coding tools. Its Codex rate card says that, as of April 2, 2026, new and existing Plus, Pro, and ChatGPT Business customers, along with new Enterprise customers, are billed by token usage instead of per-message pricing. (help.openai.com) The published table breaks usage into input, cached input, and output tokens, with different credit charges by model. In the current help-center rate card, GPT-5.4 is listed at 62.50 credits per 1 million input tokens and 375 credits per 1 million output tokens, while fast mode uses twice as many credits. (help.openai.com) OpenAI’s developer pricing page also shows short-term promotions aimed at business adoption. It says eligible ChatGPT Business workspaces can earn up to $500 in credits for a limited time, and the Pro tier is listed from $100 a month until May 31, 2026. (developers.openai.com) On advertising, The Next Web reported on April 22 that OpenAI has shifted some ChatGPT ad sales from cost per thousand impressions to cost per click. The report said pilot advertisers are seeing bids in the $3 to $5 range per click after earlier launch pricing based on impressions weakened. (thenextweb.com) Those changes put three separate constraints in view at once: privacy review before deployment, predictable developer billing after deployment, and clearer ad measurement as OpenAI looks for revenue beyond subscriptions. The company has not framed them as one package, but they arrived within the same April 2026 window. (openai.com) (help.openai.com) (thenextweb.com)