Operator

Operator's strength is its execution of a hard product question: who controls the browser, the user or the agent? OpenAI's answer is "both" — the agent drives by default, the user can take over instantly if it's about to do something wrong. You watch a virtual browser cursor click through a real website, and at any point you can grab the controls, fill in a credit card field yourself (because Operator won't), and hand back. That cooperation pattern is the right one for a class of tasks where letting the AI do everything is unsafe but doing everything yourself is tedious. The CUA (Computer Use Agent) model underneath is also genuinely good at sites it hasn't seen before, generalizing from visual layout rather than relying on hardcoded selectors.

Where it falls short is access and ambition. The $200/month Pro tier is a steep gate, and even at that price, the task ambition is bounded — Operator is at its best for moderately structured single-site tasks (book a restaurant, order from a known vendor) and degrades quickly on multi-site research or anything requiring careful judgment. Sites with heavy anti-bot measures still defeat it. The hosted browser approach also means you're working in a fresh session, which limits its usefulness for tasks where your real logged-in identity matters.

Use Operator if you're already a ChatGPT Pro subscriber and want the lowest-friction way to delegate web tasks. If you want browser automation integrated with your real personal sessions, Multion fits better. If you want full programmatic control to build your own agent on top of computer-use, Anthropic's Computer Use API or open-source alternatives like Browser Use give you that lower-level access.