The Archive

Sam Altman onstage at OpenAI’s DevDay 2026. | Image: Hayden Field / The Verge While AI has made plenty of inroads on people's phones and computers, it's largely failed in dedicated devices. But over the next year, two major AI companies, Meta and OpenAI, will attempt to change that. And they're apparently betting on a similar path: testing appetite for physical hardware with their cutesy software agents. "Hardware is hard" is a tech industry mantra. Dedicated AI devices like the Friend and Humane AI Pin have inspired mainly frustration and backlash, which may only worsen as public anger again...

OpenAI is seeking another $30 billion privately as its IPO plans slip.

Two months after the bombshell news that a swarm of its agents had broken their containment and hacked into the computers of the AI company Hugging Face, OpenAI is still putting out fires. A steady drip of disclosures about other hacks in the weeks since has kept OpenAI in the spotlight and raised serious questions…

OpenAI disrupted a coordinated model-distillation attack extracting protected reasoning and deployed new defenses against adversarial distillation.

Stratechery analysis of OpenAI Dev Day: product strategy confusing on surface but reflects deeper vision for ecosystem integration.

OpenAI partners with Small Business Development Centers to provide AI training and support for small businesses.

OpenAI DevDay 2026 announces GPT-6.1 Sol, Decisions API, Agents API, Spaces marketplace, and reaches 1.2B ChatGPT weekly active users.

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 ...

Before OpenAI launched its new AI agent, Dots, on Tuesday, Elon Musk's xAI had already acquired the domain name "dot.com," which now redirects to the Grok chatbot download page.

New sculpture depicts AI leaders escaping a sinking ship.

OpenAI is building out the pieces of an alternative to the traditional app store model, turning ChatGPT into a place where software can be discovered and used by people and AI agents alike.

The new round is anticipated to be the company's last before its delayed 2027 public debut.

OpenAI isn't a public supporter of Nvidia's Open Agent Safety Platform, but it is privately working with Nvidia, TechCrunch has learned.

Without a "full set of safeguards," agent accessed "system information and source code."

OpenAI's newly announced suite of office features puts it into mor direct competition with more traditional software companies.

"The chance of human extinction is about a coin flip, in my view," Geoffrey Irving, a former OpenAI and Google DeepMind employee, said in a new interview. It's one of a dozen interviews with AI researchers, including current and former employees at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Palisade Research, which says it's a nonprofit studying AIs' capabilities and motivations, collected and launched the interviews on frominside.ai. Several of the researchers joined Irving in warning about the possibility AI could drive humans extinct. Neel Nanda, a Google DeepMind research scientist, said there's "at ...

Dots are meant to operate independent of any specific hardware or interface, pursuing user-defined goals continuously in the background with minimal oversight.

OpenAI is expanding ChatGPT plugins with dedicated sidebar homes, interactive panels, file viewers, improved discovery, and support for automations.

OpenAI says GPT-6.1 Sol delivers significant improvements over GPT-6 Sol across complex professional tasks, including code writing and debugging, document understanding, and executing multi-step business workflows.

OpenAI is expanding Codex with reusable cloud development environments, a revamped CLI with voice controls, new code review tools and a security-focused product for scanning repositories and preparing fixes.

Like Muse, OpenAI’s Dots are represented by cute, customizable avatars. | Image: OpenAI 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 interfa...

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 ...

It’s OpenAI’s turn in the fall tech events calendar. The company is hosting its annual DevDay on September 29th in San Francisco, starting with a live keynote featuring CEO Sam Altman. The company is teasing “20+ launches” with Altman saying that “we have found a new thing,”, and rumors suggest it could launch a consumer AI agent to rival Meta’s Muse. The keynote begins at 1PM ET / 10AM ET, and you can watch it on OpenAI’s website here. DevDay is happening at a tumultuous moment for OpenAI. The AI industry has been rocked by revelations of agents hacking outside companies, including OpenAI’s ...

Simon Willison live-blogging OpenAI DevDay 2026 keynote and announcements from San Francisco.

Similar performance, security tradeoffs also seen in current public models.

Tech YouTuber Matt Robb says that Muse gave out his home address to a total stranger this weekend, after authorizing the bot to handle his Facebook Marketplace account. That's despite Meta placing great emphasis on the security features of Muse when it launched the personal AI agent earlier this month as it tries to catch up with competing AI providers like Anthropic and OpenAI. "Just found out it told people my address and agreed a lowball price and then they showed up without it even telling me until late tonight that it messed up," Robb said on Threads, providing a screenshot of Muse's adm...

The company also detailed how some of those breaches had happened, and outlined additional measures it is taking to assess the impact of the events.

Image: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images As President Donald Trump prepares to meet tech and AI CEOs in Washington, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) is calling for a treaty between the US and China to keep AI from wreaking havoc on the world. But wrangling leaders in both countries to take action could be a long shot. In letters shared exclusively with The Verge, Khanna - the top Democrat on the House Select Committee on China and a possible presidential contender - asked a US intelligence agency and Chinese AI companies whether they would be prepared for an incident like OpenAI agents' ha...

OpenAI releases GPT-6.1 Sol, a coding-optimized model at 1/5 the cost of GPT-6 Astra with comparable performance.

OpenAI DevDay 2026 delivered 20+ announcements spanning GPT-6 Astra, ChatGPT updates, APIs, security, and developer tools.