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OpenAI isn’t letting the delay of its open source AI model slow it down on shipping other features.
Today, the company is unveiling ChatGPT agent, a feature that allows its AI chatbot to autonomously browse the web, conduct extensive research, download and create new files for its human users using its own virtual computer.
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Come again? ChatGPT now gets its own PC? And it can use that PC to log into your, the human user’s, accounts and download or send stuff for you?
That’s correct, at least in a virtual sense, according to OpenAI. As the company explains:
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“The model can choose to open a page using the text browser or visual browser, download a file from the web, manipulate it by running a command in the terminal, and then view the output back in the visual browser. The model adapts its approach to carry out tasks with speed, accuracy, and efficiency.”
How to use ChatGPT agent
Users can engage the agent by clicking on the ‘Tools’ button in the ChatGPT prompt entry box, opening the dropdown menu, and selecting ‘agent mode’ from the available options.
Then, when it’s turned on describe a task in plain language, and the agent can carry it out across web and local app environments, combining reasoning with actions that previously only a human user could perform on their own machine, manually.
ChatGPT agent can connect to apps like your personal or business Gmail and GitHub, so it can pull in useful information — emails or code — from your accounts to help with tasks you ask it to do. It can connect to third-party application programming interfaces (API) to pull information and use connected applications and services through them, as well.
If a website needs you to log in, you can do that securely through a special browser view, which lets the agent dig deeper and handle more personalized tasks, like checking your inbox or filling out forms on your behalf.
Going where Operator could not — offline
The new ChatGPT agent builds upon and expands from the “Operator” agent OpenAI released in January 2025, which allowed ChatGPT to browse the web and fill out forms, place orders, and do other web-based tasks in a private “headless browser,” that is, a cloud-based custom web browser that OpenAI itself maintained and offered for each Operator session.
However, Operator was limited only to interacting with websites and web-based applications — not programs that could also run locally on a PC, such as spreadsheet tabulators and slide deck presentation making software.
The new ChatGPT agent can browse websites, interact with online forms, run code, analyze data, and del …