Claude GPT

Hand heavy work from Claude Desktop to OpenAI's frontier models and get the result back in the same chat.
Persistent sessions, real file attachments, background jobs that survive restarts, a live dashboard, and cost tracking.

Claude stays in charge. It holds your files, skills and memory, decides what needs heavy lifting, hands that work to GPT-6 Astra (or GPT-5.6 Sol) with the right brief and attachments, and relays the answer. You say things like:

"Hand ~/Downloads/board-pack.pdf to ChatGPT and ask it for a summary with the key figures."

"Give the deck and the brand guidelines to ChatGPT and have it rewrite the narrative."

"Is ChatGPT done?"

Claude calls the bridge's tools; the model works in the background on OpenAI's side; short answers come straight back into the chat, long ones land on disk with a preview, and charts appear as images.

Why

• Overflow. When Claude credits run low on a heavy day, the same chat can delegate to another frontier model without copy-pasting between apps.
• Cheap orchestrator, expensive engine. Run a lighter Claude model for the conversation and still get frontier-quality output on the delegated parts.
• Whole documents, not pasted text. Decks, spreadsheets, PDFs and images reach the model as files. The tools refuse pasted contents, so nothing gets lost in extraction.
• No timeouts, no lost work. Every tool call returns in seconds. Jobs run on OpenAI's side in background mode with a stored cursor, so a restart of Claude Desktop, or of your Mac, resumes rather than restarts.
• Watch it think. The dashboard streams reasoning summaries, web searches, code execution and output as they happen.

Quick start

macOS only for now. You need uv, an OpenAI API key (a project key with a monthly budget is wise) and, for pptx and docx attachments, LibreOffice.

uv tool install claude-gpt      # from PyPI (pipx install claude-gpt works too)
claude-gpt set-key              # prompts for the key; stored privately, never echoed
claude-gpt setup --register     # checks the key and LibreOffice, registers in Claude Desktop

Restart Claude Desktop and the seven chatgpt_* tools appear. Optional: brew install --cask libreoffice.

Upgrade later with uv tool upgrade claude-gpt. Working from a clone instead? uv sync then uv run claude-gpt setup --register. The design notes explain why registration points at the interpreter rather than uv run.

What you can do

Before the first call of a session Claude asks which reasoning level you want (low, medium, high, xhigh or max) and reports the level used in every reply. Change it on any turn.

Tools

Seven MCP tools, all returning within seconds, all answering with plain JSON that any Claude model can follow:

chatgpt_start creates a session with a brief and attachments · chatgpt_send sends a turn · chatgpt_status collects the result, waiting up to 45 seconds · chatgpt_list shows sessions, spend and the dashboard URL · chatgpt_fork carries a summary into a fresh session · chatgpt_cancel stops a job · chatgpt_close archives a session.

Attachments

Files are deduplicated by content hash across sessions, and the same file is never attached twice to one conversation. In a Cowork session, where Claude works inside a sandbox, upload paths such as /mnt/user-data/uploads/deck.pptx are matched to the copy on your Mac by name, and every response says which file was used.

Dashboard

http://127.0.0.1:8765 while the server runs. Home shows every session with status, turns and spend, plus today's and the last 30 days' totals. A session page lists its brief, attached files and jobs, with close and fork buttons. A job page streams the activity live and renders the result as Markdown when it finishes, with generated files and image previews. It recovers after a browser refresh mid-job.

Models, costs and budgets

GPT-6 Astra is the default; Sol, Terra and Luna are a model: "sol" away per session. Costs are computed per job from an editable price table (checked against OpenAI's pricing page on 4 September 2026), rolled up per session and per day, and shown in every status reply and on the dashboard. A session budget ($25) and a daily budget ($100) refuse new jobs when exceeded; Claude can override per call when you say so.

Configuration

Precedence: environment variables, then ~/.claude-gpt/config.toml, then a project .env, then defaults. The first run writes a private config.toml with every setting commented out; claude-gpt set-key fills in the key.

Every setting is listed in .env.example and config.example.toml.

Commands

Security and privacy

• Attachments are uploaded to OpenAI under your API key and are subject to OpenAI's data policies; background mode stores response data on their side for a limited time.
• The key lives in ~/.claude-gpt/config.toml, readable only by your user, and is redacted from logs. The state directory and database are private to your user.
• The dashboard binds to 127.0.0.1 only. File reads are confined to your home folder by default (CLAUDE_GPT_ALLOWED_ROOTS), symlinks are resolved before the check, and the model gets no tool that acts on your Mac.

Under the hood

Python 3.12, the official MCP SDK over stdio, the OpenAI Responses API with Conversations for server-side state and background streaming with a resumable cursor, SQLite in WAL mode for the registry, JSONL event logs per job, and aiohttp for the dashboard. Two copies of the server can share one registry safely: Claude Desktop starts a second copy for its Cowork and Code sessions, so every state change is an atomic, conditional write and one active job per session is a database invariant. The design notes cover the reasoning, the recovery model and the verification history.

uv sync && uv run pytest    # 102 tests, no network calls

Licence

MIT. Built by Karl Foster with Claude.