OpenAI's new Operator will do web tasks for you
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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios
OpenAI today released a "research preview" of an AI agent called Operator that performs web-based tasks on behalf of users.
The big picture: 2025 is shaping up to be the year of the AI agent, with agentic artificial intelligence coming from Salesforce, Microsoft, Anthropic and now OpenAI.
How it works: Users can tell Operator to fill out forms, order products, make reservations and more. It opens a browser and starts clicking and typing.
- In a blog post introducing the product, the company said Operator will "help people save time on everyday tasks while opening up new engagement opportunities for businesses."
In a livestream demo, CEO Sam Altman said Operator will be able to use the web "just like you do."
- The demo showed a user uploading a photo of a hand-written grocery list and asking Operator to buy them all from Instacart.
- Operator also provides suggested prompts like "Find tickets for the next concert at the Sphere" and "Find a restaurant with a great happy hour for next Wednesday for 6 people."
Yes, but: Users can take back control at any point, OpenAI promises.
- Operator also includes a "takeover mode," designed to ask the user to take over when inputting login credentials, payment details or other sensitive information.
- It also asks for confirmation before making reservations of purchasing tickets.
Between the lines: OpenAI says Operator is built around its "Computer-Using Agent (CUA)," a model powered partly by OpenAI's latest model (GPT-4o) and trained to interact with the buttons, menus and text messages of a computer's graphical user interface.
- This gives Operator the "flexibility to navigate digital environments without requiring OS- or web-specific APIs," OpenAI says.
- The company outlines "rigorous safety measures" built into Operator in its System Card.
- It also cautions that Operator "is still learning, evolving and may make mistakes. For instance, it currently encounters challenges with complex interfaces like creating slideshows or managing calendars."
State of play: The agent is available only to OpenAI's $200/month Pro subscribers in the U.S.
- OpenAI says it has limited initial availability for safety reasons and to collect feedback and data to improve the product.
- The company plans to expand Operator's availability to Plus, Team and Enterprise subscribers and to include these capabilities into ChatGPT "eventually."
- OpenAI has partnered with companies like Uber, OpenTable, StubHub DoorDash, Etsy and others in introducing Operator, but the agent isn't restricted to these apps.
Disclosure: Axios has limited beta usage of Operator for certain web tasks.
