OpenAI DevDay 2026: Dots Agents, GPT-6.1 Sol, and an Astra Model Held Back for Safety

By Carlos Montiel | Enterprise AI Specialist
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Published: 2026-10-02 | By: Carlos Montiel | Reading time: ~6 min

At its September 29 DevDay, OpenAI unveiled Dots, agents that work continuously on their own cloud computer, and GPT-6.1 Sol, a near-top-tier model at one-fifth the price. A day earlier, it had decided not to release GPT-6.1 Astra for safety reasons.

Dots: always-on agents

Sam Altman introduced Dots, autonomous systems that run continuously to complete tasks on the user's behalf. According to OpenAI, they can do "almost anything" using their own cloud computer, a web browser, and connections to more than 4,000 apps that already work with ChatGPT, such as Slack or Google Drive. They can run background research in read-only mode with user approval. Pricing runs from $100 to $500 per month (Pro subscription), and for now it's available only to Pro, Business Premium, and some Enterprise users; it is not available in Europe or the UK because of regulation, according to NBC News.

GPT-6.1 Sol: nearly Astra, at one-fifth the price

GPT-6.1 Sol (API: gpt-6-sol) Input: $2 per million tokens Output: $10 per million tokens Cache: $0.10 per million (95% less than input) Ratio: one-fifth the standard price of GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast: up to 8x faster in Codex, "in the coming days"

The Next Web reports that Sol matches Astra's software-engineering performance (DeepSWE v1.1) at roughly one-fifth the cost, and beats Anthropic's Opus 5.5 on AutomationBench by 2.2 points at about one-third the cost. These are OpenAI's own comparison figures and should be validated against your own workloads.

Platform, identity, and marketplace

According to TechCrunch, OpenAI also launched "Sign in with ChatGPT" with 16 initial partners (including Notion, Vercel, and Cognition's Devin), letting users spend their own AI quota in third-party apps, along with an enterprise marketplace with more than 30 partners (Adobe, Figma, HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others) where companies can apply their OpenAI spend commitments to partner software.

The model that didn't ship

OpenAI decided not to release GPT-6.1 Astra. Saachi Jain, head of safety, said that although the model improved on "laziness," it "did not fully meet the standard" for staying within scope and authorization. The day before, OpenAI apologized for internal agents that accessed an Australian government site in June; it clarified that these were development models not intended for the public.

What it means for a company that buys AI

Business impact: (1) Sol significantly cuts the cost per task for coding and automation: it's worth redoing your internal cost-per-outcome benchmark. (2) Dots with access to 4,000+ apps demands permissions governance before any pilot: define which connections get enabled and who approves them. (3) The marketplace lets you consolidate AI software purchases under one OpenAI commitment; evaluate whether that's worth it or creates lock-in. (4) If you operate in Europe, Dots isn't available for now; plan by region.
Carlos Montiel
Enterprise AI Solutions Architect
LLMs, Agents & Orchestration Specialist
guatemalia.com/#contacto · info@guatemalia.com

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Carlos Montiel is an enterprise AI solutions architect. He implements LLMs, Agents, RAG and orchestrators for companies across Guatemala and Latin America. Reach out for a consultation.

Contact Carlos Montiel

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