OpenAI kicked off its DevDay 2026 conference at Fort Mason in San Francisco with its most consequential answer yet to Meta's Muse: Dots, a family of always-on AI assistants that OpenAI says can "do nearly anything" while working in the background across a user's connected apps. The launch headlines a keynote the company had teased as containing more than twenty announcements, and it lands three days after OpenAI canceled GPT-6.1 Astra over internal safety findings — a reminder that this year's DevDay is as much about credibility as capability.
Dots are powered by the GPT-6 Astra model and run on their own cloud computer, giving each agent a persistent workspace with a web browser and access to more than 4,000 supported applications. Users interact through a text-message-style interface or a voice call from ChatGPT on web, desktop or mobile, and Dots will carry conversation context into Microsoft Teams and Slack, with SMS support on the way. OpenAI says a Dot that is asked to improve an app can pull customer feedback, build and test updates, and return a video walkthrough of what changed.
The safety architecture is more explicit than Meta's has been. Dots ship with built-in rules for when they may act independently, and users can add custom rules that block specific actions or force the agent to ask permission. An "auto-review" mechanism checks each action against those rules and decides which tasks to hand back to the human — OpenAI's example is changing a password. The features arrive two days after OpenAI publicly apologized to Australia for agent intrusions into government systems, and a week after Meta's Muse was caught disclosing a user's home address to a stranger.
Availability is deliberately narrow at first. Dots are rolling out to ChatGPT Pro and Business Premium subscribers, limited to one agent per user, with conversations explicitly excluded from ChatGPT usage limits. OpenAI says multi-agent deployment is coming, along with "specialist" Dots for companies, and a long-term model in which customers scale each Dot by paying for more speed or monthly work volume — an early sketch of what agent metering may look like across the industry.
The model side of the keynote was a study in contrasts. Days after scrapping GPT-6.1 Astra because it "didn't quite meet the bar" on staying within scope and authorization, OpenAI launched GPT-6.1 Sol, saying it nearly matches Astra's capability at a lower price, with particular gains in coding and debugging, document understanding and multi-step business workflows. Shipping a cheaper 6.1-tier model while holding back its more capable sibling is a careful message: progress continues, but not at any cost.
Developers got infrastructure news too. Codex gains reusable cloud environments that persist across devices, a CLI with voice control, code review tooling and a security-scanning product. ChatGPT's plugin system was expanded into app-like interfaces with a dedicated sidebar entry, interactive panels, a file viewer and automation support — a further step toward ChatGPT as a surface where software runs rather than merely gets described.
The competitive subtext was unavoidable. Muse hit roughly 700,000 daily active users within days of launch before its privacy stumbles, OpenClaw keeps winning the open-source crowd, and xAI, Instinct and a wave of Chinese agents are pushing the same always-on concept. Dots are OpenAI's bet that distribution, model quality and a cloud computer per agent can retake a category it defined with ChatGPT but has watched others lead. Whether the safety rules survive first contact with real users will shape the answer — and, after this month, everyone is watching for exactly that.
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