Ahead of DevDay on September 29, OpenAI appears to be preparing something called Managed Agents. The setup keeps both the agent and the environment it runs in on OpenAI's side, closely mirroring what Anthropic already sells. Traces of a second project have also surfaced: ads inside ChatGPT that resolve to an agent rather than a static link.

Aimed at companies, not just developers

DevDay 2026 takes place on September 29 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco. In-person attendance is capped at around 1,500 people and registration costs 650 USD (about 100,000 yen). The keynote, however, streams free to anyone, and satellite events are planned in eight cities including Tokyo. For a developer conference, that is an unusually outward-facing arrangement.

※1 USD = 153 JPY (as of September 8, 2026)

Agents look set to sit at the center of the keynote once again. Managed Agents is a service in which OpenAI hosts and administers both the agent itself and the environment it executes in. The management interface is not open to outsiders yet, but the platform codebase reportedly contains the pieces you would expect: creating agents, managing environments, and switching specific skills and plugins on or off. Running agents in a self-hosted environment appears to be part of the plan as well.

What stands out is that the intended audience is not limited to developers. Configuring a ready-made agent and putting it to work, rather than assembling one from scratch, is a job for the business side. The product looks designed to reach those people too.

Anthropic laid the first stone

The same shape of product already exists at Anthropic. Claude Managed Agents is offered as a hosted service for long-horizon work, and it ships with the full set: session management, sandboxed environments, scoped permissions, managed credentials, audit logs, skills, connectors, and subagents.

So OpenAI is not stepping onto ground where novelty alone wins. Arriving second with a similar product pushes the contest toward price and everyday usability. Even Anthropic's head start has not produced a lockout, since plenty of teams still reach for cheaper alternatives. OpenAI does hold a card in its models' strong computer-use capabilities, but whether that alone moves demand is not yet visible.

The build-it-yourself tool folded in under a year

OpenAI's agent strategy has been a sequence of course corrections. It started with custom GPTs in November 2023, and in October 2025 Agent Builder arrived as part of AgentKit, a no-code canvas for wiring processing steps together.

That Agent Builder was flagged for deprecation on June 3, 2026, and shuts down on November 30. The recommended paths forward are the Agents SDK for workflows that should stay as code, and Workspace Agents in ChatGPT for cases better handled by natural-language instructions. ChatKit, the embeddable chat interface, remains available.

The reason it folded so quickly is clear enough. As models grew capable of sequencing their own steps, the need for a human to draw the wiring diagram faded. Once a model can plan the route itself, a pre-drawn graph becomes a constraint rather than a help. Managed Agents reads as the next answer built on top of that lesson.

Ads may turn into agents

Separately, and regardless of whether it surfaces at DevDay, work appears to be underway on a mechanism that links advertising directly to agents. OpenAI already offers ChatGPT Ads and an Ads Manager with campaign goals, bidding, and conversion measurement. What has now come into view is a version where an ad inside a response becomes an entry point to an agent instead of a description and a link.

A user shown a product would receive an agent that carries out the steps on their behalf. That narrows the gap where people drop off midway through a signup or a booking, which makes it behave quite differently from conventional advertising. If it works, it becomes pressure that Meta and Google cannot ignore until they field an answer of their own.

That part, though, is not confirmed. It is read from code and preparation traces, and there is no guarantee it appears at DevDay at all.

Summary

DevDay 2026 runs on September 29 at the Fort Mason Center, with a free keynote stream. Managed Agents, the feature expected to headline it, puts the agent and its runtime under OpenAI's management and lands squarely on territory Anthropic productized first. Given how quickly Agent Builder was folded, the goal this time is not to add another tool but to take over the operating layer itself. Together with the ad-to-agent concept, it is worth waiting for the announcements and the pricing before drawing conclusions.