Note: This article was first published on 18 July 2025.
OpenAI’s newest feature is called ChatGPT Agent, an agentic model that can perform a variety of tasks like booking restaurants, ordering ingredients, generating reports, and more.
It’s powered by a new model that doesn’t have a name (yet) and combines capabilities from OpenAI’s existing agentic tools. This includes Operator’s ability to click around on websites, and Deep Research’s ability to collate and synthesise data into a report. To create this new model, OpenAI combined the teams behind both Operator and Deep Research.
The result, which is ChatGPT Agent, can be used to perform tasks like planning and purchasing ingredients to make a meal, checking a user’s calendar and informing them of upcoming meetings. It can even analyse competing companies and then create a slide deck to show its findings.
In a report by The Verge, ChatGPT Agent was asked to plan a date night by looking up Google Calendar and using OpenTable to look for a restaurant. In another demo, ChatGPT Agent was asked to generate a report on the rise of Labubus.
You can see ChatGPT Agent in action in this livestream by OpenAI below:
To be clear, ChatGPT Agent doesn’t actually take over your computer. Instead, it performs its tasks on its own virtual computer.
Given the agent’s enhanced capabilities, OpenAI has introduced safeguards to prevent bad actors from exploiting it. For example, there are protections in place to stop ChatGPT Agent from being used to create biological or chemical weapons. The memory feature has also been disabled because bad actors could use this feature to extract sensitive data through prompt injection attacks.
The idea of creating an AI agent that can be used to complete actual tasks—as opposed to simply looking up and providing answers to questions—has been dreamed of ever since the first science fiction novels were written. It remains to be seen how effective ChatGPT Agent is in the real world, but there’s no question that this is a step in the right direction.
Availability
ChatGPT Agent is available now to Pro, Plus, and Team users. Users who fall under these categories can use it by either picking “agent mode” in the tools menu or by typing “/agent” in the search field.