AI File Upload Limits: What Each Chatbot Actually Accepts

The awkward thing about AI file upload limits is how much of what you will read is simply wrong. The most repeated figure on the web, that Claude caps files at 30MB, is off by a factor of roughly sixteen for ordinary chat. The second most repeated, that Grok allows 48MB, appears on no xAI page at all. And Perplexity, which publishes a clear size limit, declines to tell consumer users how many files they are allowed.

The real numbers do exist, but they are scattered across five help centres, split between chat and other features, and routinely misquoted by everyone who copies them. This guide sets out what each chatbot actually accepts: file size, file count, accepted formats, and where the free tier stops. Every figure below comes from the vendor's own documentation, checked on 13 September 2026, and where a vendor genuinely publishes nothing, it says so instead of guessing.

The Key Takeaways

• ChatGPT takes the biggest files: 512MB per file, though images are capped at 20MB and spreadsheets at roughly 50MB.
• The 30MB Claude myth: Claude accepts 500MB per file in chat. The 30MB figure everyone quotes is the Projects limit, and it has been copied onto the wrong feature.
• Gemini is the smallest and the most generous at once: 100MB per file, but 2GB for video, and it is the only one that takes hours of audio.
• Grok is bigger than reported: xAI documents 150MB per file and roughly 100 files per upload on the web. The widely quoted 48MB figure is not xAI's.
• Free tiers are where it really bites: ChatGPT Free allows just 3 file uploads per day, and Perplexity meters uploads on a rolling weekly allowance it never numbers.

AI File Upload Limits at a Glance

This is the comparison most guides get wrong, usually by merging three vendors' numbers into one. The often-cited dispute between 512MB, 500MB and 100MB is not a dispute at all. Those are simply ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini.

The blank cells matter as much as the numbers. Neither xAI nor Perplexity tells consumer users how their free and paid tiers differ on uploads, so any article that gives you a Grok free-versus-SuperGrok file allowance, or tells you Perplexity Free permits three files a day, is quoting a figure with no source behind it.

ChatGPT File Upload Limits

ChatGPT is the most generous on raw size and the most restrictive on the free plan, which is an uncomfortable combination if you are evaluating it without paying.

Size caps by file type

The headline cap is 512MB per file, but it is not the limit you will hit first. OpenAI applies tighter ceilings by type: images are capped at 20MB each, and spreadsheets at roughly 50MB, which OpenAI qualifies as depending on the size of each row. Text documents carry a different kind of ceiling altogether, 2 million tokens per file, which is a measure of content rather than bytes. A dense text file can breach the token cap while sitting far below 512MB, which is why a small file is sometimes refused. If that distinction is unfamiliar, it is worth reading what AI tokens actually are before you go hunting for a corrupted file.

How many files, and how often

Upload frequency is metered rather than fixed. OpenAI describes a ceiling of 80 files every 3 hours for standard accounts, and a much harder stop for free users: 3 file uploads per day. There is also a storage ceiling most people never meet, 25GB per user and 100GB per organisation.

Note that OpenAI does not tie the 80-file figure to a named plan, so treat it as the general paid-account behaviour rather than a Plus-specific promise. Message and reasoning caps are a separate system entirely, covered in our guide to ChatGPT's message limits and when they reset.

Projects and custom GPTs

Projects have their own file allowance, and it is one of the few places where OpenAI publishes clean per-plan numbers: 5 files per project on Free, 25 on Go and Plus, and 40 on Edu, Pro, Business and Enterprise. Custom GPTs are stricter still, at 10 files per GPT for the lifetime of that GPT, which catches people out because it does not reset. Our walkthrough of how ChatGPT Projects work covers what that allowance is best spent on. A file that clears these ceilings then has to live somewhere, and that is a separate set of rules: our guide to where ChatGPT keeps the files you upload covers the folders, the sharing roles and the two different delete behaviours.

Claude File Upload Limits

Claude is the vendor the internet has most comprehensively misreported, and the error is worth spelling out because it changes what the tool is good for.

The 30MB figure is the wrong limit

Search for Claude's file size cap and you will be told 30MB, on blog after blog and even in posts that rank on page one. Anthropic's help centre, in an article titled "Upload files to Claude", splits its File limits section into two: chat uploads and project files. Chat uploads are 500MB per file, with up to 20 files per chat. Project files are 30MB per file. The widely repeated number is real, but it belongs to Projects, and it has been copied across onto ordinary chat where the true ceiling is roughly sixteen times larger.

The practical consequence: if a large PDF was refused by Claude, the file size was almost certainly not the reason, and dropping it into a Project would make things worse rather than better.

Projects trade size for quantity

What Projects give up in per-file size they regain in count. Anthropic states the file count as unlimited, with an important qualifier: total content must fit within Claude's context window. When a knowledge base outgrows that window, Claude falls back to retrieving relevant sections rather than reading everything. So "unlimited" describes what you may store, not what Claude reads at once. Our guide to how Claude Projects work goes through what that means for structuring a knowledge base, and usage caps are handled separately in Claude's session and weekly limits.

PDFs and images

Claude publishes the most detailed media rules of any vendor here. PDFs are accepted up to 1000 pages, but the analysis changes partway: Claude reads both text and visual elements up to 100 pages, and from 101 to 1000 pages it processes text only. Images are accepted up to 8000 by 8000 pixels. Supported formats are PDF, DOCX, CSV, TXT, HTML, ODT, RTF, EPUB, JSON and XLSX, with XLSX requiring code execution to be enabled. If your work is mostly documents, our comparison of the best AI PDF readers is the better starting point than any single vendor's caps.

Gemini File Upload Limits

Gemini has the lowest general size cap and by far the widest media range, which makes it the odd one out in both directions.

Files, sizes and the media exception

The general ceiling is 100MB per file with up to 10 files in the same prompt, which Google hedges as subject to availability. Video is the exception and it is a large one: 2GB per video. Duration is where the free tier shows itself. Total video length is capped at 5 minutes and audio at 10 minutes, and Google states plainly that upgrading to Google AI Pro or Google AI Ultra extends those to 1 hour of video and 3 hours of audio. That is the clearest free-to-paid cliff any of these vendors documents.

Code folders and archives

Two Gemini allowances have no equivalent elsewhere. You can add one code folder or one GitHub repository to a chat, with up to 5,000 files and a maximum total of 100MB. ZIP files are accepted too, holding up to 10 files and up to 100MB, though they cannot contain video or audio. Nobody else in this comparison offers either.

Grok File Upload Limits

Grok is the vendor people search for most on this question and the one the internet documents worst. The circulating figure of 48MB per file is not xAI's, and it appears on no xAI page. The real numbers are published, just not where most writers looked.

What xAI actually documents

xAI's FAQ for the Grok website and apps sets the ceiling at 150MB per file for most files, covering documents, images, code and audio. File counts are unusual in that they vary by platform rather than by plan: around 100 files on the web, up to 20 on Android, and on iOS xAI says only that multiple files are supported without giving a number.

The accepted format list is the broadest of any vendor here. Documents and data cover PDF, DOCX, TXT, CSV, XLSX, PPTX, HTML, XML, JSON, Markdown, LaTeX, ODT, RTF and code files. Images cover JPEG, PNG, WebP, HEIC and BMP, with xAI noting that GIF and SVG support varies by platform. Audio covers MP3, WAV, M4A, OGG, FLAC and AAC, and video covers MP4 and MOV.

What xAI does not tell you

Two things are missing, and they are the two the search traffic actually wants. There is no published difference between the free tier and SuperGrok on file uploads, and no storage limit is stated. xAI says only that limits may vary slightly by platform or subscription, which is not a number you can plan around.

There is also a second, separate set of figures worth not confusing with these. The xAI Files API reference states 512MB per file, but that documentation governs developer integrations rather than the chatbot at grok.com or inside X. Quoting it as a Grok chat limit is the same class of error as quoting Claude's Projects cap for Claude chat. Grok's paid tiers sit alongside the rest in our comparison of what each AI plan actually costs.

Perplexity File Upload Limits

Perplexity publishes a firm size limit and then, for ordinary users, deliberately declines to publish a count.

Size, and the allowance nobody can see

Size is simple: 40MB for all file types, the lowest hard cap in this comparison. File count is where it gets unusual. Perplexity states that uploads are not unlimited on Free, Pro or Max, that each plan includes an allowance which resets on a rolling weekly basis, and that Max includes a higher allowance than Pro. It gives no number for any of those three plans. It also explains that there is no fixed weekly reset day, and that each upload stops counting towards your allowance about a week after you attached it, so capacity returns gradually rather than all at once.

The odd consequence is that Perplexity documents its business customers far better than its consumer ones. Its separate enterprise page lists 30 files per session at up to 50MB each, with a weekly maximum of 100 on Enterprise Pro and 1,000 on Enterprise Max. Those are exactly the figures that do not exist for the plans most readers are on.

Formats, including audio and video

Perplexity is the most permissive on format. Alongside text, code, PDFs and images it accepts audio in MP3, WAV, AIFF, OGG and FLAC, and video in MP4, MOV, AVI, WebM and WMV. One caveat is worth knowing before you rely on it: Perplexity states that visual scenes from video files are not indexed or searchable, so speech is transcribed but the picture itself is not analysed.

What to Do When You Hit AI File Upload Limits

Once you know the real numbers, most upload failures fall into three groups, and only one of them is about size.

Work out which ceiling you actually hit

A rejected file that is comfortably under the size cap is usually hitting something else: the token ceiling on a dense text file, a page count on a long PDF, a per-type cap such as ChatGPT's 20MB on images, or a rolling allowance that has quietly run down. Splitting a document is the fastest test. If half of it uploads, you met a content ceiling rather than a byte ceiling.

Reshape the file before you upgrade

Exporting a heavy presentation or scanned document to plain PDF or text usually cuts size by an order of magnitude while losing nothing the model reads. Since most chatbots extract text anyway, a 200MB scanned file and a 4MB text export often give identical answers. Our guides to working with PDFs in AI tools and summarising a long PDF cover the conversions that help most.

Or use a different model for that one file

The most overlooked option is that these limits differ enormously, and they rarely bind at the same time. A two-hour recording is impossible on Claude and routine on Gemini with a paid plan. A 300MB file is fine in ChatGPT or Claude chat and refused by Perplexity. The ceiling you are stuck behind is a property of the account you happen to be signed into, not a property of AI.

That is the case for keeping several models within reach rather than one. Fello AI puts ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok behind one keystroke on a Mac and already handles Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files directly, so moving a stubborn document to whichever model will take it does not mean another subscription or another browser tab. If you are deciding which models to keep to hand, our rundown of the best AI models right now is the place to start.

The Verdict

If you want one rule that survives the detail: ChatGPT and Claude take the biggest single files, Gemini takes the longest media, Grok takes the most files at once, and Perplexity takes the widest range of formats at the smallest size. The free tiers are where these caps actually bite, and ChatGPT's three uploads a day is the sharpest cliff of the five.

The broader point is that none of these ceilings is a limit of the technology. They are commercial decisions, they differ wildly between vendors, and they change without announcement. Checking the vendor's own help centre beats any blog, including this one, on the day the numbers move. Every figure here was verified on 13 September 2026 against the primary sources linked throughout: OpenAI's file uploads FAQ, Anthropic's upload files guide and Google's Gemini file upload help.

Frequently Asked Questions