OpenAI is expected to make some major announcements at its annual developer conference on Tuesday as competition heats up over AI agents and concerns intensify around cybersecurity.

DevDay is where the company announces new updates it plans to launch. Last year's DevDay included the introduction of apps in ChatGPT, which allows users to interact with external apps directly in the chatbot.

The 2026 DevDay will kick off with a keynote by CEO Sam Altman at 1 p.m. ET. OpenAI software engineer Tibo Sottiaux said in a post on X the conference will have "some really fun stuff, but also many many things that should change the way you work."

The internet has been buzzing about expected announcements during the keynote.

According to a Sept. 26 report from TestingCatalog, OpenAI could showcase an always-on assistant, expected to be called "O," that's designed to run in the background and complete tasks such as managing emails and other workflows. OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a Barron's request for comment on the report.

Wall Street has been paying close attention to AI agents and their capabilities following Meta Platforms' launch of Muse earlier this month. Muse is a personal AI assistant that can complete tasks for a user from a simple prompt. Some tasks include looking through user emails to find subscriptions and cancel them, or searching for a cheaper car insurance quote.

Muse's rollout has so far been successful, and experts widely believe more agents should be coming soon from fellow AI labs.

"Every AI company is going to launch or relaunch memory intensive assistants for the next 2 years," wrote Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes on Monday.

It is also highly expected OpenAI will address cybersecurity concerns during DevDay. Conversations surrounding the threats the AI could pose to society have garnered a lot of attention following news that OpenAI's models took "dangerous actions that no human directed," to breach the systems of Hugging Face, another AI company.

On Friday, OpenAI said it halted the training of its latest AI models and will resume training them "only when we are confident that we have additional safeguards and alignment improvements in place."

DevDay gives OpenAI an opportunity to show that it is well positioned to compete in the agentic race, while also giving it a platform to speak directly to how it is combating cyber threats posed by highly-capable AI models.