While OpenAI's consumer-facing products like ChatGPT and DALL-E tend to get most of the attention, an entire arm of the company's business centers on helping enterprise users build AI products. Those customers are now getting new tools.

Corporate customers who use OpenAI's application programming interface (API) to power their AI tools are getting enhanced security features, including the ability to use single sign-on and employ multi-factor authentication by default, the company announced in a blog post. OpenAI has also added 256-bit AES encryption when transferring data, which should reduce the possibility of any of the data leaking onto the open internet.

Also: OpenAI makes GPT-4 Turbo with Vision available to developers to unlock new AI apps

OpenAI has also added a new Projects feature to let companies more easily control who can access different AI tools. With new cost-savings features, including a way to reduce spending by using a Batch API that cuts costs by as much as 50%, companies should be able to more easily stay within budget, OpenAI said.

While this week's OpenAI announcement isn't as flashy as a new version of GPT-4 or the ability to generate videos from text, it's important nonetheless. Companies around the globe are building a variety of AI tools with OpenAI's toolset that are both internal and public-facing. Absent some of these critical security and cost-savings upgrades, those companies could look elsewhere, or worse -- decide against an AI project altogether.

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Security improvements may be especially important to companies and employees, as well as the eventual customers using their AI tools. As we've seen time and again, bad actors are always trying to find ways to steal user data, conduct ransomware attacks, and more. If AI can deliver stronger security features, both company and user data is safer.

In addition to security and cost-savings, OpenAI said its new features also address some of the requests its customers have made. For instance, companies can now ingest up to 10,000 files into their AI tools, up from just 20 previously. And with a new file management features, along with the ability to control usage on the fly, OpenAI's platform should be easier to use and cheaper to run, the company said.

All of OpenAI's new API features are available now. Looking ahead, the company says it plans to keep adding security and cost-savings features to its platform.

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