Sticker packs are the newest thing ChatGPT can make for you. On 24 August 2026, OpenAI announced through the official @ChatGPT account on X that any photo, idea or inside joke can now be turned into a custom sticker pack inside the ChatGPT mobile app, complete with transparent backgrounds, and then shared straight into iMessage or WhatsApp. The feature is free, it is rolling out globally, and it runs on ChatGPT Images — the in-app name for OpenAI’s gpt-image-2 model.
The stickers people trade in messaging apps have been a quiet battleground for platforms since long before image generators existed, which is exactly why this launch matters more than its playful framing suggests.
OpenAI’s announcement was characteristically brief: “Stickers. Stickers? Stickers! Turn any photo, idea, or inside joke into a custom sticker pack with ChatGPT Images—now with transparent backgrounds. Make in ChatGPT, share on iMessage or WhatsApp.” Behind that one post sits a set of concrete numbers — up to 18 visual styles, up to 9 stickers in a pack, a 3-sticker minimum for WhatsApp export — and a strategic story about OpenAI planting its brand inside the messaging apps owned by Apple and Meta.
This article walks through what the sticker pack feature does, how to use it, the GPT Image model line behind it, and how the launch stacks up against Meta AI stickers, Google’s Nano Banana and xAI’s Grok Imagine. It also covers what a customizable sticker pack could mean for businesses that want their brand in the chat threads where customers actually talk.
Table of contents
- What the ChatGPT Sticker Pack Feature Actually Does
- How to Make a Sticker Pack in ChatGPT
- Sharing Sticker Packs to iMessage and WhatsApp
- The GPT Image Model Behind the Sticker Packs
- Why Sticker Packs Are a Strategic Play for OpenAI
- How Rivals Compare: Meta, Google and xAI
- What Sticker Packs Mean for Businesses and Creators
- FAQ
- References
What the ChatGPT Sticker Pack Feature Actually Does
The short version: ChatGPT’s image tools can now output a coherent sticker pack rather than a single image. You feed it a prompt or a photo, and it returns a set of matching stickers with transparent backgrounds, ready for messaging apps. The announcement came directly from OpenAI’s own channels — the @ChatGPT post on X is the primary source, and coverage from 9to5Mac and others landed the same day.
A sticker pack from a photo, an idea or an inside joke
The input can be almost anything. Type a description of a character, a reaction, or a running joke with your friends, and ChatGPT Images generates a themed set. Upload one or more photos from your library and the model turns the subject into a series of reaction stickers — the same face, redrawn across different expressions and poses. You can remix stickers together, add or remove elements, and transfer the style of one image onto another, so a sticker pack can evolve rather than being a one-shot output.
Transparent backgrounds, everywhere
Stickers only work as stickers because they have no background, and OpenAI has built transparent-background generation directly into the flow. Notably, the X announcement adds that transparent backgrounds now work for regular, non-sticker images too — a small line with real utility for anyone producing cut-out graphics for decks, thumbnails or product pages.
What ships in the box
The feature specification, as reported by 9to5Mac, Storyboard18 and BusinessToday, is compact:
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Where it lives | ChatGPT mobile app: Images in the sidebar, then Stickers |
| Price and tier | Free, available to free-tier users, global rollout |
| Inputs | Text prompts, one or more photos, emoji combinations |
| Styles | Up to 18, including Holographic, Anime and 3D |
| Pack size | Up to 9 stickers per sticker pack |
| Backgrounds | Transparent by default; cropped photos can be restored by outpainting |
| Sharing | iMessage, WhatsApp, or save to Photos |
Every outlet covering the launch describes it as a mobile feature; none confirms availability on the web app, so treat it as phone-first for now.
How to Make a Sticker Pack in ChatGPT
Making your first sticker pack takes a couple of minutes and no design skill. The flow sits inside the redesigned image experience OpenAI has been building all year, and the constraints are simple enough to memorise.
Step by step from the Images tab
Open the ChatGPT app on iOS or Android and tap Images in the sidebar, then choose Stickers. From there, either describe what you want — a grumpy office cat, a colleague’s catchphrase, a mascot for the group chat — or pick photos from your library. Choose a visual style from the carousel, and ChatGPT Images generates the set. Each sticker pack holds up to nine stickers, and you can regenerate or remix individual stickers until the set feels right.
From one photo to a full reaction set
The photo path is where the feature earns the “customizable” label. Upload a picture of a friend, a pet or a product and the model produces a series of reaction stickers of that same subject — laughing, crying, celebrating, judging. Because gpt-image-2 can restore cropped portions of an image, a tightly framed selfie can still come back as a full-body cartoon. Styles can be mixed per sticker, and emoji can be blended in for extra punch.
The limits worth knowing
Three numbers define the experience, and one of them is not OpenAI’s choice. The takeaway: pack limits are generous, but WhatsApp sets a floor.
Sharing Sticker Packs to iMessage and WhatsApp
A sticker pack that stays inside ChatGPT would be a novelty. The export paths are the point, and they are unusually deep for a third-party app.
The iMessage integration
On iPhone, an Add to chat apps option pushes a finished sticker pack into Apple Messages, where it appears in a dedicated ChatGPT section of the stickers carousel. That is OpenAI branding sitting permanently inside Apple’s own messaging interface — the kind of placement platform owners rarely give away, delivered here through Apple’s standard sticker extension mechanism.
WhatsApp and the three-sticker rule
WhatsApp export works the same way, with one quirk: a sticker pack must contain at least three stickers before WhatsApp will accept it. 9to5Mac reports that this floor is a constraint set by Meta, not by OpenAI. It is a small irony of the launch — OpenAI’s stickers must follow Meta’s rules to live inside Meta’s app, three years after Meta shipped its own generative stickers.
What is not on the list
Two absences are worth flagging. No coverage of the launch mentions Telegram support, and none confirms the sticker tools on the ChatGPT web app — the rollout is described consistently as mobile. Anyone planning content workflows around the feature should assume phone-only until OpenAI says otherwise, though stickers saved to Photos can of course travel anywhere an image can.
The GPT Image Model Behind the Sticker Packs
The sticker feature is the friendly face of a model line that has moved fast. GPT Image is OpenAI’s family of autoregressive image models — a different architecture from the diffusion models most rivals use, and the reason ChatGPT is unusually good at following layout and edit instructions. The line’s history explains why sticker packs were an obvious next step. Because the underlying system pairs language understanding with computer vision, the same model that reads your inside joke can also redraw your selfie in eighteen styles.
From the Ghibli moment to a product line
When image generation landed in ChatGPT on 25 March 2025, the Studio Ghibli style trend went viral hard enough that OpenAI reported over 130 million users creating more than 700 million images in the first week. What followed was a steady drumbeat of releases, each cheaper or more capable than the last:
| Date | Release | Why it mattered |
|---|---|---|
| 25 Mar 2025 | GPT-4o image generation in ChatGPT | The viral Ghibli launch; 130M users in week one |
| 23 Apr 2025 | gpt-image-1 in the API | Developers get the model behind the trend |
| 6 Oct 2025 | GPT Image 1 Mini | Around 80% cheaper via the API |
| 16 Dec 2025 | GPT Image 1.5, branded ChatGPT Images | Global rollout, 20% cheaper than GPT Image 1 |
| 21 Apr 2026 | GPT Image 2 / ChatGPT Images 2.0 | Native reasoning, up to 2K resolution, wide aspect ratios |
| 24 Aug 2026 | Stickers in the ChatGPT app | Sticker pack creation with transparent backgrounds, free |
What gpt-image-2 brings to stickers
The sticker feature leans on capabilities gpt-image-2 introduced in April 2026: a thinking mode that plans a set of images before drawing them, support for generating multiple coherent images from one prompt, and much stronger identity preservation across edits. That coherence is precisely what a sticker pack needs — nine images of the same character that actually look like the same character. The GPT Image line’s public history shows OpenAI iterating on price and capability roughly every four months, and stickers are the first packaging of that engine aimed squarely at everyday chat rather than professional creation.
Why Sticker Packs Are a Strategic Play for OpenAI
A free toy feature this polished is rarely just a toy. The sticker pack launch is best read as distribution strategy: OpenAI wants ChatGPT-made artefacts circulating inside the messaging apps people already live in, carrying the brand with them.
Planting a flag inside rival platforms
Every sticker pack shared to iMessage puts a labelled ChatGPT shelf inside Apple’s messaging UI; every WhatsApp export puts OpenAI-generated content inside Meta’s flagship app. Meta shipped its own generative stickers for WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram back in September 2023, powered by its Emu model — Mark Zuckerberg introduced them with the pitch that “every day people send hundreds of millions of stickers”. OpenAI arriving three years later, from outside, and routing around the platform owner is a genuinely different move: the sticker pack becomes a trojan horse for brand presence in threads ChatGPT could never otherwise reach.
The scale behind the push
The audience for this feature is enormous. OpenAI’s last official figures put ChatGPT at 800 million weekly active users in October 2025 and 900 million by February 2026, with third-party trackers estimating around one billion monthly actives by mid-2026. Image features have repeatedly proven they can move those numbers — and not only for OpenAI. Google’s Nano Banana image model pulled in 23 million first-time Gemini users in its first weeks and briefly knocked ChatGPT off the top of the US App Store in September 2025. Playful image tools are user-acquisition weapons, and both companies know it.
What OpenAI has not said
The gaps in the announcement are almost as telling as its contents. There is no dedicated post on OpenAI’s blog — the launch lives entirely in an X post and the app itself, which is how OpenAI increasingly ships consumer features it expects to spread by word of mouth rather than press cycle. No executive attached their name to the release, no usage targets were published, and nothing was said about whether sticker pack creation will reach the web app, the API, or business tiers.
That silence leaves room for the feature to grow quietly: if packs start circulating in group chats at meaningful volume, expect a follow-up with numbers attached, exactly as happened when the Ghibli trend forced OpenAI to publish first-week figures in 2025. Until then, the sticker pack sits in the classic OpenAI pattern of a small, shareable feature doing strategic work.
The chart below shows the two image-launch windows with stated, sourced volume figures:
How Rivals Compare: Meta, Google and xAI
The sticker pack launch did not happen in a vacuum. Within a three-week window in August 2026, xAI shipped a major image-editing update, and the memory of Google’s Nano Banana App Store coup is barely a year old. Here is how the four main players line up on chat-ready image generation:
| Offering | Launched | Sticker support | Distinctive strength |
|---|---|---|---|
| ChatGPT Stickers (gpt-image-2) | 24 Aug 2026 | Native sticker pack builder; exports to iMessage and WhatsApp | Cross-platform export from one free app |
| Meta AI stickers (Emu) | 27 Sep 2023 | In-chat generation inside WhatsApp, Messenger, Instagram | First mover, built into the messengers themselves |
| Grok Imagine Image 2.0 (xAI) | 7 Aug 2026 | No sticker pack format; region editing and background removal | Magic-wand edits, smart resize, five reference images |
| Gemini Nano Banana (Google) | Aug 2025 | No dedicated sticker packs; strong subject consistency | Viral figurine edits; took Gemini to No.1 on the App Store |
xAI’s update is the closest technical rival: Grok Imagine added region-level photo editing, background removal with transparency and smart resizing on 7 August — capabilities that overlap heavily with what sticker creation needs, without the packaging into a sticker pack format. xAI claims second place worldwide in both text-to-image and image editing on public arenas. Meta’s Emu stickers remain the incumbent inside the chat apps themselves, and Google has proven twice that a playful image model can move App Store rankings overnight.
What Sticker Packs Mean for Businesses and Creators
Beneath the fun, there is a practical marketing story. Stickers are among the most-forwarded content formats in messaging, and a branded sticker pack has historically required a designer, a developer and per-platform submission work. ChatGPT collapses that to a prompt.
Cheap, fast brand assets for chat
A small business can now produce a mascot sticker pack — the shop dog in nine moods, a product as a cartoon character — and push it into the WhatsApp threads where regulars actually talk, at zero production cost. Teams we work with on AI tools adoption consistently underestimate how much informal channels like group chats shape customer relationships; a sticker pack is the lowest-friction branded asset that can live there. Event stickers, campaign reactions and seasonal packs become an afternoon’s work instead of a design sprint.
The caveats that come with the confetti
The usual generated-content cautions apply. Uploading photos of other people into a sticker generator raises consent questions, and likeness misuse is the obvious abuse case for any tool this accessible. Provenance tooling is also uneven: Google attaches SynthID watermarks to its generated images, while sticker exports circulating through iMessage and WhatsApp will mostly shed any context about their origin. Businesses in regulated sectors should treat a sticker pack like any other public-facing creative asset — reviewed before it ships, not after it spreads. And EU-facing brands should keep one eye on the AI-content labelling rules that begin to bite in 2027.
FAQ
Is the ChatGPT sticker pack feature free?
Yes. The feature is available to free-tier users of the ChatGPT mobile app at no extra cost, and coverage describes the rollout as global. There is no indication that pack creation draws on a paid quota, though normal image-generation limits on free accounts presumably still apply.
How many stickers can one sticker pack contain?
Up to nine. You can generate fewer, but WhatsApp will only accept an exported sticker pack containing at least three stickers — a floor 9to5Mac attributes to Meta’s own platform rules rather than to OpenAI.
Which apps can I share a sticker pack to?
iMessage and WhatsApp are the two named targets, alongside saving stickers to your photo library. On iPhone, shared packs appear in a dedicated ChatGPT section of the Messages sticker carousel. Telegram is not mentioned in the announcement or in launch coverage.
Does sticker creation work on the ChatGPT web app?
The launch is described everywhere as a mobile feature, accessed through Images and then Stickers in the app’s sidebar on iOS and Android. No source confirms web availability, so assume it is phone-only for now.
Can I put other people in a sticker pack?
Technically yes — the photo path will happily turn any uploaded face into reaction stickers, and that is precisely why a moment of judgement is worth applying. Turning a friend’s photo into a sticker pack for your shared group chat is the intended, harmless use. Doing the same with someone who has not agreed, or with a public figure, moves into likeness territory that messaging apps, employers and — in some jurisdictions — regulators take seriously. A simple rule works: only upload photos of people who would enjoy receiving the finished pack.
Which model generates the stickers?
ChatGPT Images — the product name for OpenAI’s gpt-image-2 model, which shipped to the API on 21 April 2026 and reached ChatGPT as ChatGPT Images 2.0. It is the same engine behind the transparent-background option for regular images.
References
OpenAI @ChatGPT sticker announcement on X
9to5Mac: ChatGPT now lets users create custom iMessage and WhatsApp stickers
Storyboard18: ChatGPT gets custom stickers feature powered by Images 2.0
BusinessToday: ChatGPT rolls out AI-generated stickers
TechCrunch: Generative AI stickers are coming to Meta apps
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