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• OpenAI is rumored to launch a new AI agent tool in January

• The report claims that it is called Operator and that it can control your browser

• This help could help them write code or book travel on your behalf

Forget chatbots: AI’s next big thing is expected to be artificial intelligence agents that can perform computing tasks on your behalf, and a new report claims that OpenAI’s version will be available very soon.

OpenAI’s new tool, named “Operator”, could be released in January, according to Bloomberg and its two internal sources. It will apparently be released initially as a research preview and through the company’s application programming interface (API) for developers to get their hands on.

AI agents are designed to operate your computer on your behalf without supervision. Like Anthropic’s similar “computer use” tool for Claudethe operator of OpenAI should be able to perform actions such as writing code or booking trips.

Space promises to be the next big battleground for AI, with Google recently leaked its so-called Jarvis AI tool who can browse the web for you. According to The informationit could beat OpenAI by a wide margin by landing in December.

Like Google’s solution, OpenAI’s equivalent is expected to be a “general-purpose tool that performs tasks in a web browser,” according to Bloomberg’s source. So while it might not be quite ready to drive desktop apps on your behalf, OpenAI’s Operator looks like another pretty powerful browser extension.

How much do you trust AI?

There is no doubt that tech giants believe that AI agents are the next big computing platform. Recent Reddit AMASam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said: “I think the next big thing will be agents.”

This apparent breakthrough will also happen soon, with Altman adding: “In my humble opinion, this is going to be a big theme in 2025.” Recent announcements and leaks from Anthropic, Microsoft, Google and OpenAI certainly support this.

However, since AI agents are expected to work autonomously without supervision, they could also require a high level of trust. A significant asterisk on tools like ChatGPT Search – which is already searching the web for you – these are early versions which may still make errors.

In October, OpenAI released a new benchmark called ‘SimpleQA” to measure the accuracy of its own AI models – and its recent o1 preview model performed rather poorly, achieving only a 42% success rate in the new benchmark.

So while AI agents could be the next hot feature in 2025, it may still be a while before we trust them to automate our IT tasks – at least without careful supervision.

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