GPT-5.2: OpenAI Responds to the Gemini 3 Pro Surge
GPT-5.2 landed in December 2025 as OpenAI's response to Gemini 3 Pro's rise. It's a meaningful improvement over GPT-5 on several benchmarks — but the honest assessment is that Google leads the overall race as of this release.
Context matters here. Gemini 3 Pro shipped in November and reportedly triggered a code red at OpenAI — users were switching, Arena rankings flipped, and for the first time in a while, Google had a clear lead on both benchmarks and user preference.
GPT-5.2 is the response. It's good. It's just not enough to retake the top.
What's Improved
- Reasoning quality — Better on scientific and mathematical benchmarks than GPT-5. HLE score reaches 34.5%, a solid improvement.
- Coding — Competitive with Gemini 3 Pro on general coding tasks; still trails Claude Opus 4.5 on agentic workflows.
- Instruction following — Continues to improve. GPT-5.2 is more reliable on complex multi-part instructions.
- Speed — Noticeably faster than GPT-5 at equivalent quality.
How It Compares at Launch
| Model | HLE | ARC-AGI-2 | Chatbot Arena |
|---|---|---|---|
| Gemini 3 Pro | ~35% | ~38% | #1 |
| GPT-5.2 | 34.5% | — | top 3 |
| Claude Opus 4.5 | moderate | — | top 3 |
| Qwen 3.5 (235B) | open-wt leader | — | open-wt |
GPT-5.2 is competitive with Gemini 3 Pro on HLE and good across the board. It doesn't retake the top of the Arena leaderboard at release.
Best For
- Teams already on OpenAI's API who want a meaningful quality bump without migration
- Tasks where Gemini's responses feel off (tone, formatting preferences, API quirks)
- High-volume applications where OpenAI's infrastructure reliability matters
- Codex-based coding (GPT-5.2-Codex variants in the benchmark tables are strong)
Not For
- Multimodal-first tasks — Gemini 3 Pro is still the best here
- Coding agents — Claude Opus 4.5 + Claude Code remains the best stack
- Teams evaluating the best available model — that's still Gemini 3 Pro as of this writing
Verdict
GPT-5.2 is a solid model that lands in a tough position. OpenAI isn't behind — they're in a tight three-way race with Google and Anthropic. But "solid and competitive" is a different story from the GPT-4 era when OpenAI set the pace and everyone else caught up. The arena has changed.
Part of our Model Watch series.