ChatGPT Agent surprises, unsettles, and divides: here’s how users and professionals are reacting.

OpenAI’s autonomous assistant does more than just click on its own: it generates excitement, concerns, and new questions about work, security, and transparency.

From the announcement on July 17, 2025 to the progressive rollout in the following days, ChatGPT Agent has started to appear in Plus, Pro, and Team accounts across several regions. With its cursor moving autonomously, it accesses real websites, fills out forms, analyzes web data, connects to email and cloud drives, and executes multi-step tasks through an interface visible to the user. Even though the feature is still limited to early adopters, reactions within both the professional world and the broader user community have been immediate—mapping out a complex landscape of enthusiasm, caution, and the first concrete use cases.

Many experts describe it as the leap from “calculator to computer.”

Tech professionals and managers see the new agent as an operational accelerator, capable of linking research, automation, and output in a coordinated way.

The most enthusiastic initial responses have come from product designers, marketers, and developers who have been able to test the agent within controlled environments or on their Team accounts. On LinkedIn and X, the most common comparison is that the agent feels like a junior UX designer equipped with real tools: “Now I can ask it to research insights, prepare a slide, and structure a Google Sheet—without ever leaving ChatGPT.”

Consultants—especially in travel, fintech, and marketing—have reported concrete cases such as pitch decks drafted in 26 minutes, competitive analyses structured as full reports, optimized travel plans, and files ready for sharing.

However, many professionals with experience in AI stress that this is not a refinement tool, but rather an accelerator for initial phases, brainstorming, and synthesis. They describe it as “rough but fast,” with behavior that changes depending on the structure of the task.

The “phantom cursor” effect fascinates the public, but unsettles security experts.

The agent’s ability to navigate sites and bypass CAPTCHAs autonomously opens a new debate between those impressed by its efficiency and those worried by its lack of safeguards.

Among the most viral reactions on social media is a thread on X showing the agent passing a Cloudflare “I’m not a robot” test by clicking autonomously, with no human input. The clip reached millions of views and drew mixed reactions: some celebrate the “birth of the first fully operational assistant,” while others see it as a security flaw disguised as a feature.

Cybersecurity analysts, including Noma Security’s team, have released detailed reports warning of risks such as:

• prompt injection hidden on visited websites;

• unintentional inheritance of user credentials (especially on Gmail, Google Drive, and GitHub);

• lack of clear audit trails to track exactly what actions the agent performed;

• all-or-nothing permissions in connectors (no way to grant access only to specific folders or emails).

Many are calling for the introduction of a “Watch Only” mode to observe the agent’s actions without actually executing them, along with a clearer separation of roles, protected environments, and boundaries for interactions.

Companies are interested but are waiting for more granular controls.

IT managers and CIOs don’t contest the agent’s potential, but demand logs, auditability, and enterprise deployment before opening the doors.

Within large organizations, adoption is much more cautious. While the potential is clear—especially for internal tasks, document research, onboarding, and data entry—there is still a lack of sufficient governance structures to integrate it at the enterprise level.

According to internal sources at OpenAI, many companies are requesting:

• complete and downloadable logs of agent sessions;

• integrated SSO to authenticate users with corporate credentials;

• the ability to limit actions to specific sites or internal environments;

• on-premise or private cloud deployment with their own firewall and rules.

Without these features, many CISOs prefer to disable connectors and watch the public community’s learning curve from afar.

General users are fascinated but also frustrated by operational limitations.

Regular users are testing the agent on travel searches, e-commerce, and personal documents, with mixed but often promising results.

Outside the professional sphere, the reactions are just as lively. Plus and Pro users report on Reddit and X sessions where the agent:

• finds Airbnb accommodation according to precise criteria (e.g., 3 bedrooms, sea view, under €150 per night);

• reorders Google Drive by date or relevance;

• automatically fills out forms for reimbursements or public requests.

Many point out high token consumption, delays in loading JavaScript-heavy sites, or off-target clicks (the agent clicks the wrong button, or gets stuck on non-standard captchas). Some jokingly refer to it as the "devourer of credits" and suggest a free preview mode for risk-free experimentation.

But when it works, the feedback is almost always the same: “the real value is peace of mind, not just time saved,” as one user quoted by Business Insider wrote.

New divides are emerging between juniors and seniors, experts and newcomers, companies and individuals.

The debate around ChatGPT Agent isn’t just about technology; it’s about how roles, responsibilities, and expectations are being reshaped across workflows.

With the arrival of an agent capable of contextual decision-making, many observers note a shift in expected value:

• juniors fear losing supportive tasks (research, initial drafting, data gathering);

• seniors see the agent as a way to delegate routine work and focus on strategy and judgment;

• content creators hope for semi-autonomous generation of reports, carousels, emails, and presentations;

• freelancers dream of a supplementary workforce without onboarding, contracts, or constant supervision.

At the same time, the emergence of autonomous agents raises new questions for regulators, web providers, and search engines: how should agent traffic be classified? How can it be distinguished from human activity? How can content automatically extracted be properly compensated?

A new era of public testing has just begun.

The global reaction to ChatGPT Agent oscillates between technical fascination and ethical caution, but curiosity remains sky-high.

As OpenAI gradually expands access and the models supporting the agent (with future plans for GPT-4o Mini and Team Enterprise), the market is watching. Competitors are experimenting with similar alternatives (Anthropic is working on “Task Chains,” Google on a new agent for Vertex), but for now, ChatGPT Agent is the only accessible consumer agent performing real-world tasks in a real browser.

And while many worry about its limitations, it’s equally true that no other AI assistant has come this close to true operational autonomy in daily life.

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