OpenAI may be able to control your PC for you soon — what we know about the new agent tool

Agentic AI is very much the next big thing — taking control of your device and doing stuff on your behalf. It’s everything we wanted our old smart assistants to be, but were just to dumb to do.

Now, OpenAI is reportedly entering this arena, and it may come sooner than you think. Software engineer Tibor Blaho, someone who has been rather accurate at AI product leaks, has found evidence of OpenAI Operator in the ChatGPT macOS desktop app.

This is the long rumored agentic system that we’ve been waiting for, and it ties in nicely with earlier reports that Operator would land this month.

What was found?

Blaho found signs of Operator in the ChatGPT desktop app for macOS, where there are hidden options to assign keyboard shortcuts for “Toggle Operator” and “Force Quit Operator.”

As we already know from our time using various AI agents, the purpose of these will be to operate on your behalf on your system — working on multi-step tasks you assign with a prompt. This will mean you can have the Operator working on your more menial tasks like setting up a spreadsheet.

Moreover, it could be the next step in that classic example AI companies use: making a travel plan. Instead of just giving you suggestions of what to do with your time, Operator may be able to go one step further and help by actually booking flights and accommodation based on the preferences you give it.

Of course, we don’t know exactly how far OpenAI’s tool will stretch into the PC like this. This is us putting pieces together from what we’ve seen in automation tools from the likes of Anthropic. But I don’t think it’s too far of a stretch to assume we may be getting close to this.

Please don’t be macOS exclusive

Now for the big question mark. You see, these settings were spotted in the macOS app, but nothing has been said about them in the Windows version of ChatGPT.

As you can probably see in the responses under the Blaho’s X post, the community is essentially praying that we don’t get the situation where it’s an indefinite wait for a brand new feature to come to Windows.

I know that Microsoft’s OS is a totally different beast to macOS, but please. I beg of you, OpenAI, don’t put this behind the Cupertino wall. Let the Redmond crowd have a go, too! If I could ask it to defrag my drives, that would be a godsend!

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