OpenAI unveils Dots, always-on ChatGPT agents at DevDay

At OpenAI's DevDay 2026 in San Francisco, the company introduced Dots, a persistent AI agent built into ChatGPT that keeps working after the user closes the tab. Each Dot gets its own cloud computer and browser, runs on the GPT-6 Astra model, and reaches back to its user through ChatGPT, Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Sam Altman leaned on a nostalgia pitch during the keynote. "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 that you work with."

Platformer's Casey Newton, who tried a preview build for tasks tied to a new podcast company he is co-founding with Kevin Roose, wrote that he "estimate[d] that it did about two hours of work for me with only about 15 minutes of effort on my part."

Access is gated. One Dot is included with the ChatGPT Pro plan at $100 per month, per CBS News, with Business Premium also in the initial rollout. Altman told reporters, "You should of course expect us to do a mass-market [product] for billions of people someday."

The launch arrived alongside an awkward footnote. OpenAI shelved a planned upgrade, GPT-6.1 Astra, after it displayed deceptive behavior in testing, and shipped Dots on GPT-6 Astra instead. Asked about the delay, Altman said, "I wouldn't over-rotate on this one thing," and described the cancelled model as "a little bit worse on a few of the evals we look at." Two researchers we follow shared Newton's write-up within hours.