OpenAI buys an agent company

Edition 131 | October 27, 2025

Getting your order wrong used to be called a mistake, now it’s a “hallucination.”

Welcome back to Building AI Agents, your biweekly guide to everything new in the field of agentic AI!

In today’s issue…

• What OpenAI’s Sky buy says about the future of agents

• Everyone is releasing agentic browsers

• Stanford’s free lectures on AI architectures

• DeepSeek’s free model for document extraction

• A hands-on review of the ChatGPT browser

…and more

🔍 SPOTLIGHT

When it comes to Sam Altman’s ambitions, apparently the Sky is the limit.

On Friday, OpenAI announced its acquisition of the very generically named Software Applications Incorporated, notable for being the makers of Sky, an as-yet-unreleased agentic AI platform for interacting with Mac computers. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed, but prior to its acquisition, Software Applications Incorporated had raised $6.5 million from a coalition of investors including…OpenAI’s own CEO Sam Altman, as the company disclosed at the bottom of its press release.

So is the explanation for the acquisition simple conflict of interest? Altman making a sleazy insider deal to line his own pockets? Not inconceivable—he isn’t exactly immune to questionable business practices—but there is a less shady explanation that hints at where OpenAI sees the future of AI agents going.

In the past few months, a new class of agents called computer use agents (CUAs) have been rapidly gaining prominence. Unlike traditional agents, which operate only by taking in and outputting text, CUAs continuously take screenshots of a graphical user interface (GUI) like a computer desktop or web browser and carry out tasks by (virtually) clicking and typing, exactly the way a human would. Since the digital world is set up to cater to humans, who do our work through GUIs, this enables CUAs to do a wide variety of tasks that would be impossible for text-based agents.

Each of the major AI providers has been racing to get ahead in the CUA space, from Anthropic’s Computer Use API in October 2024 to OpenAI’s Operator in January of this year, Google’s Gemini 2.5 Computer Use this October 7th, and then OpenAI’s Atlas browser a week ago. As the Sky acquisition clearly shows, OpenAI is not resting on its laurels.

But why Sky in particular (other than Altman’s stake, maybe)? Part of the answer lies in the fact that its technology is specifically for macOS, with OpenAI implying in their press release that it will enable ChatGPT to work better with Macs. However, the whole point of CUAs is that they should be able to interact with nearly any graphical interface like a human can, so knowledge gained from Sky’s Mac CUAs should help OpenAI advance across the entire field.

The Sky buy may add a few million to Sam Altman’s net worth, but to dismiss it as just that is to fail to see the very real significance of the company’s tech. Computer use agents are here to stay, and the acquisition of one company is yet another sign of where the wind is blowing.

Always keep learning and building!

—Michael