SILICON VALLEY/BEIJING — OpenAI unveiled Dots, an artificial intelligence agent that runs around the clock, setting up a fierce rivalry with Meta's Muse. Chinese companies, spurred by Muse's popularity, are rolling out agents of their own, extending the U.S.-China AI contest from large language models into the market for agents.
OpenAI Chief Executive Sam Altman introduced Dots on the 29th at DevDay 2026, the company's annual developer conference, held at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco.
Dots learns context and can carry out tasks on a user's behalf 24 hours a day. Users can assign work through the ChatGPT website or app as well as through outside channels such as the workplace messaging tool Slack and Microsoft Teams. Reflecting recent security incidents involving agents, the product includes a feature that lets users set custom rules.
Dots runs on GPT-6 Astra, OpenAI's most advanced model, giving it strong performance. OpenAI engineers are using Dots to fix dozens of software bugs a day. "I feel like I finally have my focus back. I don't feel addicted to my phone the way I used to. This is the way I always wanted to use AI," Altman said.
OpenAI led the chatbot market after launching ChatGPT in November 2022, but lost the initiative early this year when rival Anthropic released enterprise AI and coding tools. OpenAI countered with its coding tool Codex, only to face another challenge on the 8th of this month when Meta introduced Muse, a free personal agent. Muse, backed by social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp that draw more than 3 billion active users a day, overtook ChatGPT to become the most downloaded app.
The arrival of Dots is expected to intensify competition among agents. Beyond Muse, several rivals have already emerged, including Google's Gemini Spark, SpaceXAI's Grok Bot and Instinct's Instinct. OpenAI will offer Dots first to users of its enterprise products and subscribers to ChatGPT Pro, its higher-tier plan, and plans to widen access over time. Meta also expanded Muse to small and mid-sized businesses on the same day, signaling that it is targeting corporate customers as well as individual users.
OpenAI is also taking steps ahead of a possible listing. Bloomberg reported the same day that the company is seeking at least $30 billion in new investment at a valuation of $1.4 trillion (about 1,900 trillion won). Anthropic raised $65 billion in May at a valuation of $965 billion.
Chinese big tech firms are striking back with personal AI agents of their own. Chinese business outlet STCN reported on the 29th that ByteDance has been internally testing a personal AI agent since April and plans to release it soon. Alibaba has been expanding its AI chatbot Qwen since November last year into a personal assistant that performs real tasks by linking to shopping, travel and mobile payment services. Tencent has added agent features to its Yuanbao assistant since July, strengthening its handling of complex tasks and document generation.
