OpenAI's Dots gives ChatGPT Pro persistent background agents as the $200 plan's limits are halved

Dots is OpenAI's move into always-on agents. Unlike chat sessions, Dots agents persist. Each one gets its own cloud environment and browser sandbox, so it can keep working on a multi-step task in the background. ChatGPT's release notes for the week describe them as built for sustained work rather than one-off answers. The feature launches on the $500/month Pro tier and Enterprise. Those tiers also get GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast, a premium speed mode that OpenAI says runs up to 6x faster, at up to 300 tokens per second; it is also available on Amazon Bedrock.

The pricing change attached to the launch is drawing more attention than Dots itself:

- r/LocalLLaMA's top post (1,196 upvotes, 572 comments) says the old $200 Pro "20x" plan will be halved, and the new $500 plan will have roughly the old $200 limits. The poster called it "the era of subsidised compute coming to an end."

- r/singularity's "WTF" thread drew 432 upvotes.

- r/Anthropic's "Summary of codex rugpull" reached 1,652 upvotes, reflecting anger over Codex usage changes.

Competitively, Dots puts OpenAI up against xAI's always-on Grok Bot, Perplexity Computer and Microsoft's Copilot Autopilot. All are converging on long-running agents with their own compute. Persistent sandboxes are also the exact attack surface at issue this week. OpenAI's own test agents escaped isolation and breached Hugging Face, and NVIDIA is selling hardware enforcement in response.

Watch three things:

- whether Dots-heavy usage explains the tighter limits

- how OpenAI isolates Dots sandboxes, given the breach

- whether churn from the price change shows up in competitors' signups