OpenAI Gives Plugins a Sidebar, a Sign-In and a Marketplace

OpenAI used DevDay to make ChatGPT, which it says has 1.2 billion weekly users, a place where third-party software is discovered, launched and run.

The individual announcements landed as separate features. Taken together, TechCrunch's Sarah Perez argued, "today's announcements turn ChatGPT itself into the place where software can be discovered, launched, and used by people and agents alike." For anyone shipping a developer tool, that is a distribution question before it is a product one.

Plugins get a sidebar, panels and file viewers

ChatGPT already had plugins connecting it to Slack, SharePoint, Airtable and Google Drive. The new piece is plugin extensions, which give an app a dedicated home in the ChatGPT sidebar rather than a tool call buried in a conversation. Developers can build interactive panels users work in while chatting, and those panels can include file viewers for whatever formats the product uses.

Permissions get finer too: when a user picks a plugin, they approve its access needs individually. ChatGPT Sites — the lightweight websites users build inside ChatGPT — can host these plugins, so a developer can hand a colleague a working app that runs on that colleague's own connected data and permissions.

Discovery, and a sign-in that carries credits

ChatGPT will start suggesting apps inside the flow of a conversation when it decides one would help finish the task. The pull for users is "Sign in with ChatGPT," which lets them bring their AI allowance with them into a third-party app — a real cost argument for the end user, and a reason for a developer to be on the list. OpenAI named 16 launch partners for it, including Cognition's Devin, Notion, Vercel, T3, OpenClaw and Dactyl, and says more are coming.

There is also an enterprise marketplace with 30-plus partners at launch, among them Adobe, Figma, Sierra, Decagon, HubSpot, Salesforce, ServiceNow, Harvey, Legora, Palo Alto Networks, CrowdStrike and Baseten. Eligible customers can apply part of their OpenAI commitment toward approved partner software — procurement budget routed through OpenAI rather than around it.

Review looks like app review

The submission path is the part that will feel familiar, and TechCrunch drew the comparison directly, calling it "OpenAI's version of Apple's App Review process, if you will." Developers can now track a review, see what needs fixing, request a human review, and update a plugin's tools without restarting the whole submission. A new Plugin Creator tool handles building, and OpenAI says it has changed how plugins are ranked and recommended both in the directory and inside conversations.

One item matters more than its billing: OpenAI is adding support for the proposed MCP Events specification, which would let a plugin start automations off events in a connected app. That turns a plugin from something a user invokes into something that reacts.

The office layer on top

The same keynote shipped work software. Space is a shared workspace where colleagues collaborate with ChatGPT and with their own Dots, OpenAI's new agent personas. "Your pages and files all live together in Space, like they would in a drive," Sam Altman said. "But spaces feel alive." Pages is a companion word processor OpenAI describes as "a new type of document, built for human and agent collaboration." Collaborative slides were announced but are not out — an OpenAI representative said they roll out in the coming weeks.

What to watch

Two things decide whether this is a channel or a demo. First, whether the review queue behaves like a queue you can plan a release around now that status is trackable. Second, whether MCP Events ships as specified — event-triggered plugins are the difference between being a feature users remember to open and being infrastructure. If you already run an MCP server, the extension work is mostly surface; the sign-in and marketplace terms are the parts worth reading closely before committing.