OpenAI is building managed agents to rival Anthropic

If you have spent the last year dragging nodes inside OpenAI’s Agent Builder, it might be time to pack it up.

OpenAI is gearing up for DevDay 2026 on September 29 at Fort Mason in San Francisco, and the headline act is an enterprise-grade Managed Agents platform.

Codebase clues reveal a hosted setup that closely mirrors Anthropic’s Claude Managed Agents. We are talking sandboxed environments, scoped permissions, managed credentials, audit logs, skills, plugins, and the ability to spin up subagents for long-horizon workflows.

From visual drag-and-drop to fully autonomous pipelines

OpenAI’s approach to agents has evolved at breakneck speed. It kicked off with Custom GPTs in November 2023, followed by a workflow-style Agent Builder in October 2025.

Fast forward to June 2026, and OpenAI quietly scheduled Agent Builder and Evals for shutdown after November 30, paving the way for its Agents SDK and Workspace Agents. The reality is simple: modern frontier models no longer need human-built pipelines to stitch tasks together.

Beyond developer tooling, OpenAI is also preparing business-facing features that could rattle Silicon Valley’s advertising giants.

Tests indicate OpenAI is working on turning ChatGPT ads into full-blown interactive agents. Instead of tapping a link that dumps you onto a standard landing page, sponsored queries could launch a custom agent to answer questions, guide your decision, and manage the conversion funnel directly inside the chat.

Why it matters

Building reliable multi-agent workflows has traditionally required a painful amount of plumbing, from running sandboxes to handling credentials and logging. By packaging all of that into a managed cloud service, OpenAI lets developers and small teams build serious autonomous apps without hiring a dedicated platform engineer.

Whether it takes off immediately comes down to pricing. Anthropic paved this road first, but many teams still lean on cheaper DIY alternatives. Even with OpenAI’s strong computer-use models, adoption hinges on whether running hosted agents burns through enterprise budgets faster than they deliver value.

We think the real chess move here is the advertising angle. If OpenAI allows sponsors to deploy conversational agents that handle customer conversions on the spot, it bypasses the traditional search-and-click funnel entirely. Until Google and Meta deploy equivalent conversational ad formats, OpenAI could capture high-intent commercial traffic that legacy ad networks simply cannot touch.