ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages and download files

Summary

ChatGPT Containers can now run bash, pip/npm install packages, and download files 26th January 2026 One of my favourite features of ChatGPT is its ability to write and execute code in a container. This feature launched as ChatGPT Code Interpreter nearly three years ago, was half-heartedly rebranded to “Advanced Data Analysis” at some point and is generally really difficult to find detailed documentation about. Case in point: it appears to have had a massive upgrade at some point in the past few months, and I can’t find documentation about the new capabilities anywhere! Here are the most notable new features: ChatGPT can directly run Bash commands now. Previously it was limited to Python code only, although it could run shell commands via the Python subprocess module. It has Node.js and can run JavaScript directly in addition to Python. I also got it to run “hello world” in Ruby, Perl, PHP, Go, Java, Swift, Kotlin, C and C++. No Rust yet though! While the container still can’t make outbound network requests, pip install package and npm install package both work now via a custom proxy mechanism. ChatGPT can locate the URL for a file on the web and use a container.download tool to download that file and save it to a path within the sandboxed container. This is a substantial upgrade! ChatGPT can now write and then test code in 10 new languages (11 if you count Bash), can find files online and download them into the container, and can install additional packages via pip and npm to help it solve problems. (OpenAI really need to develop better habits at keeping their release notes up-to-date!) I was initially suspicious that maybe I’d stumbled into a new preview feature that wasn’t available to everyone, but I tried some experiments in a free ChatGPT account and confirmed that the new features are available there as well. container.download My first clue to the new features came the other day when I got curious about Los Angeles air quality, in particular has the growing n...