OpenAI DevDay 2026: The biggest news and announcements

For months, people have wondered when OpenAI will go public. CEO Sam Altman says it won’t happen until the company can make better promises about model safety, with no firm timeline in sight. “We intend to continue with AI progress … but as the models have had this surge forward in capability, and we see more of that ahead of us, we have got to be able to make confident safety claims,” Altman said Tuesday during a Q&A with reporters after his DevDay keynote. At the same time, he said, waiting too long for an IPO would be “bad for the world.”

Altman’s comments come after months of controversy about whether or not OpenAI and its rivals can control their own creations. In July, news broke that an unreleased OpenAI model had hacked into a rival AI lab, Hugging Face, without OpenAI’s knowledge. More cybersecurity incidents soon came to light at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, and Google. A high-profile resignation letter from an Anthropic employee sparked a public discussion about how risky these systems are for society at large. OpenAI, alongside its rivals, called for regulation and “pacing the frontier.” And earlier this month, Altman said in an interview that the company would likely not go public this year.

OpenAI is responding to Meta’s buzzy Muse AI with agentic helpers of its own: Dots. During its DevDay keynote on Tuesday, OpenAI announced that Dots will serve as always-on AI assistants that can “do nearly anything” across connected apps in the background while learning your preferences over time.

The company’s capable GPT-6 Astra model powers Dots, which use their own cloud computer to access a web browser and more than 4,000 supported apps. You can interact with a Dot through a text-message-like interface that’s similar to the one offered by Muse, as well as hop on a voice call with it from ChatGPT on the web, desktop, or mobile. Dots can also connect to Microsoft Teams and Slack, where they will carry over the context from your sessions on other apps and devices. It will soon be able to talk to you over text message as well.

On Tuesday, OpenAI’s annual DevDay event began with protests, flyers, and chants. “Sam Altman, get off it, put people over profit,” said a group of protesters marching in a circle in front of a series of signs that spelled out “PEOPLE OVER PROFIT.”

More than a dozen organizations came together to sponsor a rally outside the entrance to the event venue at San Francisco’s Fort Mason, including Bay Resistance, Tech Workers Coalition, Service Employees International Union, San Francisco Rising, and the San Francisco Labor Council. A large orange sign read “Drop the ICE contract.” Multiple people dressed in cardboard robot costumes waved cardboard scythes around. Signs read “No killer robots for ICE,” “People over AI,” “Where is your moral codex?” and “No climate destruction.”

OpenAI popularized the modern generative AI chatbot, but as its 2026 DevDay event approaches, it’s fallen behind in one of the industry’s hottest categories: continuously running, consumer-facing AI agents. On Tuesday, it will likely try to capture the lead in that race. Rumors abound that OpenAI will release its own AI agent, dubbed Aeon — its answer to Meta’s Muse, SpaceX’s Grok Bot, OpenClaw, and many more.

Aeon could have a shot at success, but to beat the competition, it would need to pull together the best features of several different agent platforms. The ideal system would be as useful as the open-source OpenClaw, as cheap and easy to set up as Meta’s Muse, and as simple to chat with as the up-and-coming Instinct. Conversely, it would aim to solve the serious security risks that have plagued agents since the rise of OpenClaw and only continued with Muse.