What happened to Operator and agent mode
OpenAI deprecated Operator on August 31, 2025 and folded it into ChatGPT agent. Then ChatGPT agent went too. Somewhere between July 8 and 16, 2026 its menu entry started disappearing, and by early August the people who went looking for it found a “no longer available” notice. No migration path. If you’d set it up to check a competitor’s prices every week or fill the same vendor form every Thursday, you got to rebuild that from nothing, which is an odd thing to ask of the people who’d trusted it most. I haven’t seen a public explanation for the removal.
What OpenAI points to now is ChatGPT Work, launched July 9: a persistent cloud VM with a cloud browser attached for browser workflows, on paid plans but not Free or Go. Atlas, OpenAI’s actual browser, closed on August 9 as well, and the ChatGPT Atlas page has that story.
The sign-in wall
A browser sitting in OpenAI’s data center isn’t logged into your email, your CRM, or the supplier portal with the password nobody on your team remembers. So the cloud browser can “pause for sign-in or takeover,” per an OpenAI support page dated September 7, and wait for you to grab the controls and log in. An open GitHub issue from August 18 reports takeover failing. I keep coming back to that issue, because for the jobs people most want automated (the ones behind a login) the handoff is the whole ballgame.
dassi mostly sidesteps it. It works in Chrome, Edge or Brave, in the profile you already use and are signed into, with the agent running locally on your machine; the page content and your instructions still travel to whichever model provider you picked, through dassi’s relay if you’re on included credits. When a site has logged you out, dassi signs in with what your browser’s password manager autofills and you type the 2FA code. The password stays in the password manager, and you never paste it into a chat or into dassi’s settings.
When to choose ChatGPT Work
If you already pay for Plus or Pro and the work is mostly public pages, use it. It runs on OpenAI’s machine, too, which matters more than it sounds, since dassi’s scheduled runs happen in your browser and need it open when they’re due. I wouldn’t argue anybody out of a tool they’re already paying for.
When to choose dassi
When the Thursday form matters more to you than whose model fills it in. You’d show dassi that form once, tell it in plain English where each value comes from, save it, and rerun it whenever (or on a schedule, as long as the browser’s up). GPT does that job fine. So do Claude, Gemini and the rest, a local model through Ollama included.
It costs $10 a month on your own API key, or $25 to $300 on a plan with credits. ChatGPT Free and Go users, who don’t get browser workflows at all, don’t have to upgrade anything to use it.
If that takeover bug gets fixed, ChatGPT Work gets a lot more interesting for logged-in work, and I’d want to rerun this comparison.