OpenAI’s Berlin developer gathering offered little that was fresh, but it made one position unmistakable: the company wants to sit underneath other people’s businesses. DevDay Exchange 2026 mostly recycled the San Francisco announcements. Fresh detail came on Dots arriving in Europe, on Codex traction and at the audience question session.
Dots remains beyond reach for most European consumers. Romain Huet, who runs developer experience at OpenAI, put wider access roughly weeks away once regulator conversations conclude. Paying individual customers in the European Economic Area, Switzerland and Britain have no access yet; some corporate seats do.
On usage, OpenAI prefers multipliers to headcounts. It says German weekly active Codex users climbed twentyfold from January 2026, steeper than the more than sevenfold jump reported in June, and still declines to give absolute figures. Nearly a fifth of desktop users open skills for documents, spreadsheets or presentations now.
Video understanding drew a blunt answer: nothing matching Gemini’s sequence handling exists because customers have scarcely requested it. The panel said heavy compute requirements ended Sora in March, pointing to appetite for coding tools and autonomous agents, and did not foreclose a comeback. A weekly code sweep aims to trim processor load from agents that each get their own virtual machine.
Underneath sits the platform pitch. Agents API means OpenAI hosts the runtime, plugins and web apps give partners a storefront, and the draw is 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users plus less engineering work. Open-sourcing Codex Harness does not loosen the grip, since managed services and ChatGPT-based customer discovery are hard to replace once a product depends on them.
