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!