Cole Brennan: I'm going to paint you a room and I want you to just — sit in it for a second. September 29th, Fort Mason, right on the San Francisco waterfront. Twenty-five hundred developers. OpenAI DevDay 2026. Altman steps up.
Malcolm Reeves: You were there?
Cole Brennan: No, no — but I've been deep in the coverage. And the phrase that I can't let go of, the thing Altman actually said: 'distribution is the current frontier.' Not the model. Not the research. Distribution. To a room full of developers who build on top of his platform.
Malcolm Reeves: Now — that's a loaded room to say that in.
Cole Brennan: SO loaded. Because his framing was this explicit three-stage progression — model first, then development, then distribution — and he's telling those 2,500 people we're in stage three. Which means... what, exactly? The model wars are basically over? That's — I mean, that's a bold thing to say the same day you're releasing GPT-6.1 Sol.
Malcolm Reeves: The sequence matters. He's not saying the model is finished — he's saying it's no longer the differentiator. The differentiator now is where software gets discovered, and who sits in that seat.
Cole Brennan: Which is why they announced the OpenAI Marketplace. And why ChatGPT got rebranded — their word — as an 'operating system for work.' And then you get this cascade of features: ChatGPT Space, Private Intelligence, Pages, Teams, event-driven automations, richer plugins. It's a lot. It's a lot to announce in one swing.
Malcolm Reeves: And the question underneath all of it — the one those developers in that room are actually asking — is whether OpenAI can be trusted to hold that seat. Because they've tried this before.
Cole Brennan: Right — but the part that kills me is *how* they're trying to fix it this time. Because okay, think about it this way. Your email assistant doesn't just write your emails. It quietly goes out and hires a scheduling app, an invoicing tool, a calendar service — on your behalf. You never open a store. You never browse a grid. The assistant just... does it. That's Dots. That's the whole idea.
Malcolm Reeves: So users never actually see the Marketplace?
Cole Brennan: Sometimes they don't. That's — I mean, that's almost the *point*. Dots is always-on. It's selecting and invoking tools autonomously. The Marketplace exists, but it's not a grid you scroll. It's more like... the inventory Dots pulls from without asking you.
Malcolm Reeves: And the billing — where does that land?
Cole Brennan: That's where Sign in with ChatGPT comes in. When you use a partner app through ChatGPT, that consumption counts against *your* ChatGPT subscription. Not Apple's cut. Not Google's. OpenAI becomes the commercial relationship. Apple and Google just... get stepped around.
Malcolm Reeves: That's — wait. Apple's 30% just disappears from the equation?
Cole Brennan: If the usage flows through ChatGPT, yeah. Which is why the Pro 500 tier at five hundred dollars a month actually matters here — it's not just a power-user plan, it's the revenue rail. Twenty-five times the Plus usage, and partner-app consumption routes through it. OpenAI collects. The Agents API, which went public beta September 10th and got expanded at DevDay — parallel tool execution, automatic context compression — that's the plumbing making it all run underneath.
Malcolm Reeves: The question that sharpens with the Agents API — not softens — is whether developers actually trust OpenAI to be that commercial relationship. Given March.
Cole Brennan: Three hundred integrations that nobody could find, yeah. And Sam Altman at DevDay 2026 still hasn't published a revenue-sharing model. Developers are being asked to build on a marketplace with no disclosed math. That's — I don't know, man. The architecture is genuinely different this time. But trust isn't architecture.
Malcolm Reeves: But trust isn't architecture — and the record on that is actually specific. The LA Times, March 2026. The first ChatGPT app store had over 300 integrations available. Three hundred. And users couldn't find them. Partner companies had constrained the functionality, hidden the entry points. Six months after launch, effectively dead.
Cole Brennan: And Altman at Fort Mason — nothing. No 'here's what broke.' No 'here's what we fixed.' Just... the new announcement.
Malcolm Reeves: Not a word. Which is — I mean, you can call it a successor, a relaunch, a distinct initiative, OpenAI hasn't said which. That ambiguity is doing a lot of work right now.
Cole Brennan: What sharpens it for me is this. Picture a developer — say she's building a legal-document tool, been integrating for four months — and she reads the March LA Times piece. Then six months later she's watching DevDay and Altman doesn't acknowledge it once. What does she do with that?
Malcolm Reeves: Now, that's the pattern. And it's not just the Marketplace. OpenAI halted at least one model release — said it 'didn't quite meet the bar.' Which, fine, that's responsible. But you add that to 300 buried integrations and no revenue math disclosed, and you start to see an announcement-to-execution gap that's — it's consistent.
Cole Brennan: Whoa — the halted model fits the same shape. Yeah. It's not one miss, it's a cadence.
Malcolm Reeves: And loyalty in this space is genuinely fragile. DeepSeek — January 2025 — displaced ChatGPT as the App Store's top app. Just like that. Nvidia dropped 17% in a single day. The ground shifts fast.
Cole Brennan: DeepSeek knocked them off the top of the App Store — that's not a rounding error. That's users walking.
Malcolm Reeves: And the part that comes next — the revenue-sharing question — makes this worse. Because Anthropic is already in this space with a competing managed-agent runtime, and OpenAI still hasn't told developers what share they actually get. That's the number this whole platform lives or dies on.
Cole Brennan: And that number — that share — it just doesn't exist anywhere in writing. Picture this: a freelance designer, Wednesday afternoon, she opens ChatGPT. Dots has already fired up in the background, pulled three client proposals, and invoked some third-party design tool through the Marketplace to do it. She didn't choose that tool. Dots did. And the developer who built that tool? They have no written contract telling them what percentage of that transaction flows back to them. None. Apple publishes 70/30. Google Play publishes 70/30. OpenAI has — I mean, there's just a blank where the math should be.
Malcolm Reeves: No disclosed split at all?
Cole Brennan: Nothing published. And Sign in with ChatGPT means OpenAI already controls the billing relationship on the user side — they collect the subscription, they see the transaction. So they have the infrastructure, they just haven't told the developer what comes back to them.
Malcolm Reeves: That's the ledger with one side filled in.
Cole Brennan: Exactly one side. And that's — wait, actually that's the whole irony. OpenAI built the billing infrastructure for users and just left the developer side of it blank. And that designer's tool developer is sitting there going, do I keep building? And now Anthropic's managed-agent runtime is right there as an alternative — potentially getting to economic clarity first. That's not a hypothetical threat to the Marketplace, that's a live one.
Malcolm Reeves: So what does a developer actually do right now?
Cole Brennan: I mean — honestly? They wait, or they go look at Anthropic. Those are kind of the only moves. You can't build a real business on a revenue share you can't calculate.
Malcolm Reeves: And Anthropic gets to that number first — the dynamic shifts.
Cole Brennan: The whole developer base OpenAI needs for the Marketplace to work starts migrating before the Marketplace even matures. That's not a distribution story anymore. That's a trust-and-math story, and OpenAI is losing it by not publishing a single line of revenue terms.
Malcolm Reeves: The image that sticks with me is the App Store icon. Still on your phone. You just — haven't tapped it. Because Dots already did the choosing. That's what OpenAI is actually competing for. Not the moment you search inside the App Store. Whether that moment happens at all.
Cole Brennan: Yeah. And the thing is — I mean, that's genuinely elegant as a play. It's just that the 300 buried integrations are still sitting there in the record. And there's still no line in writing telling a developer what percentage comes back to them. Those two facts don't go away because the architecture got smarter.
Malcolm Reeves: And Anthropic gets to that number first — the whole platform question tilts.
Cole Brennan: That's the one. That's the thing I can't un-see. Sam Altman at Fort Mason, September 29th, in front of 2,500 developers — and the revenue math just isn't there.
Malcolm Reeves: The ledger with one side filled in. I think that's where we actually are. Good conversation.
