OpenAI’s new agent is a shot at Meta — but can it compete with free?

At OpenAI’s annual DevDay conference, the company pulled out all the stops to compete with its rivals — primarily Meta, whose Muse AI agent platform has seen early runaway success. CEO Sam Altman walked onstage to cheers and announced Dots, a “real-deal AI” agent powered by GPT-6 Astra, “inspired by the cool agents that we all watched in movies growing up.” Similar to Muse, Dots aims for disarming cuteness, taking the form of colorful, personalizable blobs with eyes. OpenAI fired shots at Meta by demonstrating Dots’ ability to not just act as helpful assistants but build metaverse-esque virtual worlds. But in one key area, Dots strikingly fails to compete: price.

Muse’s main selling point is making AI agent access free and frictionless. The company offers a free dedicated virtual machine that houses both the agent and the user’s associated data. OpenAI’s Dots, by contrast, is restricted for now to users on its $20/month Pro plan and up. While anyone with a Meta account can get Muse, most of ChatGPT’s 1.2 billion users won’t be able to use Dots.

There’s an obvious reason for this: OpenAI likely can’t afford it. The AI lab is reportedly currently aiming to raise $30 billion in funding at a $1.4 trillion valuation, per Bloomberg, and it’s experienced 70 percent growth since the beginning of its third quarter — nearing $70 billion in annual recurring revenue, Axios reported. Yet despite its staggering financing, its funds aren’t limitless, particularly compared to a tech giant like Meta. In the past year, some users have accused AI labs of passing costs on to customers amid an AI money squeeze. OpenAI in particular is burning through a lot of cash right now — it expects to spend $280 billion by 2030, per the FT — and compute is expensive, while it’s also facing pressure from investors to button up its bottom line ahead of going public.

“Dots are starting out as a premium product — it uses a lot of compute,” Altman said Tuesday during a private press Q&A after his DevDay keynote, adding, “I think it will help us understand and help people understand how expansive and what AI can do. But you should of course expect us to do a mass-market thing for billions of people someday.”

During DevDay, OpenAI took pains to explain why Dots (with singular agents referred to as a “Dot”) are worth the money, positioning it as not just a capable personal assistant but a “chief of staff” or experienced engineer. OpenAI employee Holly Li told the audience using a Dot was “like talking to a second brain.” Altman said that Dots were built for delegating “ambitious pieces of work,” like QA for an unreleased product, website design, team offsite trip planning, portfolio rebalancing, and email campaign creation. “Specialist” Dots, trained for areas like accounting and legal analysis, are supposed to launch soon, and the company is working with Microsoft to integrate them into its Agent 365 platform.

The goal, Altman said, is to go beyond agents that simply book reservations, purchase meals, search calendars, and schedule appointments — classic use cases for consumer-facing tools like Muse.

When asked during the press Q&A how Dots is different from Muse and Instinct, another popular new AI agent, Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core products, said it’s “capable of actually staying on track in very long periods of time.” He added that the multimodality of Dots, which will allow chatting with an agent via text or voice mode and phone call, will feel like “an incredible extension of you.” (The voice demos of Dots didn’t work at DevDay, though, and though OpenAI leaders highlighted the texting-your-agent feature multiple times at the conference, that feature — already supported by Muse and Instinct — is still slated as coming soon.)

Altman said during the Q&A that the long-horizon and knowledge-work tasks were what set Dots apart, adding, “I think this is far beyond anything else available on the market today.” He said that the agents’ help with triaging to-do lists and supporting employees at work would be “difficult for economists to measure right away” but would hopefully make a “huge difference” in how people feel about their jobs.

Framing Dots as a professional tool not only differentiates Dots from Muse, but could help OpenAI gain ground against Anthropic in the enterprise market. Anthropic has focused on — and dominated in — enterprise AI for years, but OpenAI has devoted more resources to the area over the past year. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar told CNBC that the company’s enterprise business had doubled since July.

OpenAI leads also tried to promote Dots as safer and more secure, particularly compared to Muse. Alexander Embiricos, the company’s Codex product lead, said OpenAI is focused on having the “most trustworthy, safe, and secure assistant,” highlighting that it’s powered by GPT-6 Astra, the company’s “most aligned model.” During the DevDay keynote, executives also presented “OpenAI Private Intelligence,” a data privacy framework that allows businesses to have “stronger controls” over their data, as well as zero data retention policy options, with no data stored on OpenAI servers.

Altman said onstage that OpenAI hopes to “set a new standard for privacy in frontier AI.” The comments come after Muse was recently lambasted for taking over a user’s Facebook Marketplace account and giving out their address to a stranger without the user realizing.

“I think we’re in a different position to Meta in that they don’t have an AI product that has 1.2 billion users,” Glen Coates, OpenAI’s head of app platform, told The Verge in an interview. “Launching something that makes those kinds of mistakes is something that we would try to take the care to avoid. I think we’re trying to be really deliberate with how we let our agents use plug-ins, how we let agents use your identity and sign-in/sign up for things, how we let your agents pay for things.”

The question is whether all that is enough to beat free. ChatGPT rose to prominence not only by being first but also by being free — and easy to use even without signing in. Muse may be able to dominate in the AI agent space for the same reason. The other hurdle for making these AI agents as frictionless as possible is that Meta offers easy integration with the other platforms it owns, such as Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. (Google’s Gemini Spark agent platform has an advantage for the same reason.) Though OpenAI said users would be able to connect Dots to a wide range of external tools, they may not be as seamless as an in-house integration.

For now, OpenAI is hoping that a better product will trump a cheaper one. “We might move a tiny bit slower, but we also know that if people have Dots that go out there and YOLO-buy stuff on Facebook Marketplace, that’s just not something we want to put 1.2 billion users through,” Coates said. “We’re trying to do it right, basically.”