OpenAI launches Dots, always-on ChatGPT agents at DevDay

OpenAI used its Tuesday DevDay in San Francisco to launch Dots, always-on personal agents that live inside ChatGPT and keep working after the user closes the tab.

Each Dot is powered by GPT-6 Astra, gets its own cloud computer and browser, and can reach more than 4,000 apps through OpenAI's plugin ecosystem. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, pitched the product in familiar terms. "It's like an AI helper that always has your back, inspired by the cool versions of what we all watched in movies growing up," he said, adding that users "can delegate ambitious pieces of work the way you would to a high agency engineer or a chief of staff."

Suggested tasks include scheduling meetings, making travel arrangements, budgeting, debugging systems and writing code. The company also cited software developers using Dots to monitor customer feedback and scientists rerunning analysis on experimental data.

Availability is narrower than the pitch. Dots are rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers in eligible markets, with the Pro launch excluding the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the UK. Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare workspaces get beta access through administrators. Each user gets one Dot at launch, included in the subscription; multiple agents and ways to scale their speed or workload are planned for later. OpenAI says background "proactive research" is restricted to read-only access to connected apps, and conversations with Dots do not count toward ChatGPT usage limits.

Altman also flagged an evaluation trade-off. "This model was a little bit worse on a few of the evals we look at," he said, though he told the room he "wouldn't over-rotate on this one thing." Beyond the ChatGPT client, Dots surface in Slack and Teams, with text messaging promised. OpenAI said it is working with Microsoft to integrate specialist Dots with Agent 365 governance and security controls, the enterprise plumbing the company needs to sell autonomy to buyers who already run Microsoft. The launch lands in a dense week of OpenAI news we've been tracking.