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We may see OpenAI’s agent tool, Operator, released sooner rather than later. Changes to ChatGPT’s code base suggest that Operator will be available as an early research preview to users on the $200 Pro subscription plan.
The changes aren’t yet publicly visible, but a user on X who goes by Choi spotted these updates in ChatGPT’s client-side code. TechCrunch separately identified the same references to Operator on OpenAI’s website.
Here are the three interesting tidbits we spotted:
- There are multiple references to the operator.chatgpt.com URL. This URL currently redirects to the main chatgpt.com web page.
- There will be a new popup that tells you to upgrade your plan if you want to try Operator. “Operator is currently only available to Pro users as an early research preview,” it says.
- On the page that lists the Plus and Pro plans, OpenAI will add “Access to research preview of Operator” as one of the benefits of the Pro plan.
Image Credits:TechCrunchBloomberg previously reported that OpenAI was working on a general-purpose agent that can perform tasks in a web browser for you.
While this sounds a bit abstract, think about all the mundane things you do regularly in your web browser with quite a few clicks — following someone on LinkedIn, adding an expense in Concur, assigning a task to someone in Asana, or changing the status of a prospect on Salesforce. An agent could perform such multi-step tasks based on an instruction set.
More recently, The Information reported that OpenAI could launch Operator as early as this week. With today’s changes, it seems like everything is ready for a public launch.
Anthropic has released an AI model that can control your PC using a “Computer Use” API and local tools that control your mouse and keyboard. It is currently available as a beta feature for developers.
It looks like Operator is going to be usable on ChatGPT’s website, meaning that it won’t interact with your local computer. Instead, OpenAI will likely run a web browser on its own servers to perform tasks for you.
Nevertheless, it indicates that OpenAI’s ability to interact with computers is progressing. Operator is a specific sandboxed implementation of the company’s underlying agentic framework. It’s going to be interesting to see if the company has more information to share on the technology that powers Operator.
Romain Dillet is a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch. He has written over 3,000 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, privacy, security, fintech, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With twelve years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In fact, his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover N26, Revolut and DigitalOcean. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.
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