All of the updates from OpenAI DevDay 2025

This is an excerpt of Sources by Alex Heath, a newsletter about AI and the tech industry, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.

This week, I got an up-close look at how far apart Silicon Valley and Hollywood are on what to do about AI.

OpenAI has launched new integrations that plug controls for other apps directly inside ChatGPT, letting you call them up to make a playlist in Spotify or search for local real estate listings on Zillow without leaving the chatbot.

It’s a bit like the “mini” apps that messaging platforms like Telegram and Discord have embedded inside their platforms, or the extensions that bring controls for music players to your iPhone’s Dynamic Island, but with an AI twist. With the integrations, you can continue talking to ChatGPT while providing instructions about how you’d like it to interact with an app.

OpenAI is introducing a way to work with apps right inside ChatGPT. For software and services that connect to a new ChatGPT SDK, now you can tag in their apps to help you complete a task while ChatGPT offers context and advice.

The company showed off a few different ways this can work. In a live demo, an OpenAI employee launched ChatGPT and then asked Canva to create a poster of a name for a dog-walking business; after a bit of waiting, Canva came back with a few different examples, and the presenter followed up by asking for a generated pitch deck based on the poster. The employee also asked Zillow via ChatGPT to show homes for sale in Pittsburgh, and it created an interactive Zillow map that the employee then asked follow-up questions about.

Collabs with fictional characters are on the horizon for Sora. Officially, that is, as OpenAI moves to restrict the flow of unauthorized horrors like meth-cooking and Nazi SpongeBobs and criminal Pokémon that have plagued the platform from day one.

Bill Peebles, leader of the Sora team at OpenAI, said fictional character appearances in videos, known as cameos, are “on the roadmap,” with details hopefully dropping “soon,” teasing a sanctioned way to use copyrighted characters on the platform.

Sora now lets you rein in your AI doubles, giving you more say on how and where deepfake versions of you make an appearance on the app. The update lands as OpenAI hurries to show it actually cares about its users’ concerns as an all-too-predictable tsunami of AI slop threatens to take over the internet.

The new controls are part of a broader batch of weekend updates meant to stabilize Sora and manage the chaos brewing in its feed. Sora is essentially “a TikTok for deepfakes,” a place to make 10-second videos of pretty much anything, including AI-generated versions of yourself or others (voice included). OpenAI calls these virtual appearances “cameos.” Critics call them a looming misinformation disaster.

OpenAI has rolled out some long-awaited parental controls for ChatGPT to all web users, with mobile coming “soon,” according to the company.

The controls, announced last month, allow for reducing or removing certain content — like sexual roleplay and the ability to generate images — and reducing the level of personalization on ChatGPT conversations by turning off its memory of past transcripts.

OpenAI’s latest personalization play for ChatGPT: You can now allow the chatbot to learn about you via your transcripts and phone activity (think: connected apps like your calendar, email, and Google Contacts), and based on that data, it’ll research things it thinks you’ll like and present you with a daily “pulse” on them.

The new mobile feature, called ChatGPT Pulse, is only available to Pro users for now, ahead of a broader rollout. The personalized research comes your way in the form of “topical visual cards you can scan quickly or open for more detail, so each day starts with a new, focused set of updates,” per the company. That can look like Formula One race updates, daily vocabulary lessons for a language you’re learning, menu advice for a dinner you’re attending that evening, and more.

One of the mysterious AI devices that OpenAI is considering developing with Apple’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive, “resembles a smart speaker without a display,” The Information reports. People “with direct knowledge of the matter” told the publication that OpenAI has already secured a contract with Luxshare, and has also approached Goertek — two of Apple’s product assemblers — to supply components like speaker modules for its future lineup of AI gadgets.

OpenAI has also considered building glasses, a digital voice recorder, and a wearable pin, according to sources speaking to The Information, with the first products being targeted for release in late 2026 or early 2027.

OpenAI this week released what it says is the largest study yet of how people are using ChatGPT, revealing fresh insights on who is using the technology and what they are using it for.

The big surprise was finding out that most ChatGPT chats aren’t about work. In June 2025, 73 percent of ChatGPT messages were non-work related, up from 53 percent a year earlier, the 62-page report said.

Elon Musk is suing Apple and OpenAI over claims that their deal to build ChatGPT into the iPhone is stifling competition in the AI industry. In a lawsuit filed on Monday, the Musk-owned X Corp. and xAI also accuse Apple’s Apple Store of “deprioritizing” rival chatbots and “super” apps, including Grok and X.

Musk’s companies claim that iPhone users “have no reason” to download third-party AI apps because the company “force[s]” users to use ChatGPT as their default chatbot app when enabling Apple Intelligence. “Apple and OpenAI have locked up markets to maintain their monopolies and prevent innovators like X and xAI from competing,” the companies allege.

Last week, on GPT-5 launch day, AI hype was at an all-time high.

In a press briefing beforehand, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said GPT-5 is “something that I just don’t wanna ever have to go back from,” a milestone akin to the first iPhone with a Retina display. The night before the announcement livestream, Altman posted an image of the Death Star, building even more hype. On X, one user wrote that the anticipation “feels like christmas eve.” All eyes were on the ChatGPT-maker as people across industries waited to see if the publicity would deliver or disappoint. And by most accounts, the big reveal would fall short.

OpenAI has officially closed its nearly $6.5 billion acquisition of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famed former Apple designer Jony Ive, the company announced Wednesday. But it was careful to only refer to the startup as io Products Inc.

The blog post initially announcing the acquisition was also scrubbed from OpenAI’s website due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

Thanks to a related trademark lawsuit, we know what OpenAI and Jony Ive’s first AI device won’t be.

In court filings submitted this month, leaders from io — the consumer hardware team OpenAI recently acquired from Jony Ive’s design studio for $6.5 billion — testified that the first device they plan to release won’t be an “in-ear device” or a “wearable.” They also say the AI device won’t ship until “at least” 2026.

OpenAI has scrubbed mentions of io, the hardware startup co-founded by famous Apple designer Jony Ive, from its website and social media channels. The sudden change closely follows their recent announcement of OpenAI’s nearly $6.5 billion acquisition and plans to create dedicated AI hardware.

OpenAI tells The Verge the deal is still happening, but it scrubbed mentions due to a trademark lawsuit from Iyo, the hearing device startup spun out of Google’s moonshot factory.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT service was down all day for many users after the platform started experiencing performance issues on Tuesday morning. The chatbot responded with a “Hmm…something seems to have gone wrong” error message to my colleague after failing to load, and users across X and Reddit are reporting platform outages.

Downdetector showed that issues started at around 3AM ET, with multiple regions impacted globally. OpenAI’s own status page said that some users started experiencing “elevated error rates and latency” at that time, noting that the issues were affecting ChatGPT, its Sora text-to-video AI tool, and OpenAI APIs. OpenAI added a separate line for “elevated error rates on Sora” at 5:23AM ET, and later updated the status for both to “partial outage.”

The leaders of OpenAI and Google have been living rent-free in each other’s heads since ChatGPT caught the world by storm. Heading into this week’s I/O, Googlers were on edge about whether Sam Altman would try to upstage their show like last year, when OpenAI held an event the day before to showcase ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode.

This time, OpenAI dropped its bombshell the day after.