Welcome to the forefront of conversational AI as we explore the fascinating world of AI chatbots in our dedicated blog series. Discover the latest advancements, applications, and strategies that propel the evolution of chatbot technology. From enhancing customer interactions to streamlining business processes, these articles delve into the innovative ways artificial intelligence is shaping the landscape of automated conversational agents. Whether you’re a business owner, developer, or simply intrigued by the future of interactive technology, join us on this journey to unravel the transformative power and endless possibilities of AI chatbots.
OpenAI Dots vs Meta Muse vs Grok Bot is less a contest of intelligence than a question of which work you want to hand over. We compare price, access, data policies and the jobs each always-on agent was actually built to do, based on what has shipped.
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In the space of about 48 hours, all three companies selling always-on AI agents touched Slack, and each of them used it in a different way. On 28 September SpaceXAI opened a beta of Team Bots, which gives each shared Grok Bot its own Slack handle so that it sits inside a channel like a colleague. On the morning of 29 September Meta announced Muse for Small Business, which adds Slack as one of more than a dozen connectors that Muse can act through, alongside QuickBooks and Shopify, and that afternoon OpenAI took the DevDay stage to launch Dots, agents that you can message from ChatGPT, Slack or Microsoft Teams.
On the surface the three products now look almost interchangeable, since each one gives an AI agent its own cloud computer and browser, keeps working after you close the app and asks for permission before doing anything sensitive. The resemblance is misleading, however, because each company started from a different customer and is still optimising for that customer, which means the more useful question is not which agent is smartest but which kind of work you actually want to hand over.
OpenAI Dots are persistent agents that live inside ChatGPT and run on GPT-6 Astra. According to OpenAI’s launch post, each dot has its own cloud computer, can reach more than 4,000 apps through ChatGPT’s plugin ecosystem and learns your preferences from feedback, and every example OpenAI chose to demonstrate it is a work loop, whether that is turning customer feedback into tested pull requests, revising launch materials when a product’s scope changes, rerunning a scientist’s analysis when new data arrives or updating a sales proposal as a client’s requirements shift. You start with one “primary dot”, and OpenAI says teams of dots working together are something it envisions over time rather than something that ships today.
Meta Muse is a consumer personal agent that launched in the US on 8 September and has since expanded to Canada, running through a dedicated app, the muse.ai website and WhatsApp. When we walked through the Muse web interface shortly after launch, the pitch was unmistakably domestic, with the agent booking travel, sending emails and making purchases through the accounts you connect, and it found an audience quickly, passing 2.5 million downloads in 13 days. Muse runs on Meta’s Muse Spark models, and it is the only one of the three with a genuinely free tier.
Grok Bot is SpaceXAI’s agent product, which entered beta on 11 August and started life as an internal prototype that xAI staff used for sales outreach, marketing campaigns, office operations and bug fixes, according to Unite.AI. Its defining idea is that you run several named bots rather than one assistant, each on its own persistent cloud machine, and the new Team Bots feature lets a group of colleagues share a bot that has been set up for a specific role.
The cheapest way into each product tells you a great deal about who it is for, since Muse has a free tier, Grok Bot is folded into mainstream $20 and $30 subscriptions, and Dots sits behind OpenAI’s $100 Pro tier.
Sources: OpenAI Help Center, CNBC, Cursor, SpaceXAI and Unite.AI. Prices checked 30 September 2026.
Three details in that table are easy to miss. Grok Bot launched only on top-tier plans, but SpaceXAI widened access on 26 August to every SuperGrok tier and every paid Cursor plan, and it says Grok Bot work draws on its own allowance rather than your existing Grok or Cursor usage, which makes a $20 Cursor Pro subscription the cheapest paid route to an always-on agent among the three. OpenAI’s Pro tiers page confirms that ChatGPT Pro now comes in $100, $200 and $500 versions, and that new Pro 200 subscribers receive a lower usage allowance than before, so the $100 floor is real but the amount of background work each tier buys is still shifting. Meta, meanwhile, has only described its paid tiers as extra usage rather than extra features, with AI chief Alexandr Wang telling CNBC at launch that Muse would come in a free version or at $20 or $100 a month depending on how much you use it.
Because none of the three has been independently benchmarked on real delegated work yet, the fairest comparison is to map each company’s own demos and documentation against the jobs people actually want to offload, and to be clear about which cells are core features and which are merely possible.
Reading down the columns makes the split plain. Muse is the clearest fit wherever the job involves your personal accounts, your money and your messaging apps, and Meta is now stretching that same design toward the one-person business, with Meta’s VP of AI products Vishal Shah telling Axios that roughly a third of early Muse users were already connecting some kind of business account. Grok Bot is the one designed most explicitly around work split among several agents that the user sets up and manages, which is why its examples are sales pipelines and engineering teams rather than dinner reservations. Muse can also divide a task internally, since Meta says the Muse Spark model behind it can delegate execution across parallel subagents, but that happens out of sight rather than as a team you build. Dots sits between them as a single, persistent colleague that already knows everything your ChatGPT account knows, because it shares memory with ChatGPT and inherits the plugin permissions you have already granted to ChatGPT, ChatGPT Work and Codex.
That inheritance is the real differentiator for Dots, and it cuts both ways. For someone who already runs their work through ChatGPT and Codex, a dot starts with context that a fresh Muse or Grok Bot account would take weeks to build, which is also why MarkTechPost argued that much of what Dots does was already possible with Codex and that the change is mostly in the packaging. For someone who rarely opens ChatGPT, the same design means the product has very little to work with, and no amount of cute branding will change that.
If you are deciding between them today, the choice depends far more on where your unfinished work lives than on any benchmark, and the following rough guide reflects what each company has actually shipped rather than what it has promised.
All three companies isolate the agent on its own cloud machine and keep passwords away from the model, but they differ on what happens to the data the agent collects. Meta’s launch announcement says people can opt out of their interactions being used to train its AI models, which means training is the default, and it describes a separate Sentinel agent that must approve anything Muse sends to the internet. OpenAI says it does not train on Business, Enterprise or Edu workspace content by default, while personal plans are governed by the “Improve the model for everyone” setting.
The more surprising detail sits in OpenAI’s own privacy and safety FAQ, which states that you currently cannot view, delete or edit individual memories your dot has built up, and that disconnecting a plugin stops new access without deleting what the dot has already absorbed into its context. The only way to clear a dot’s context is to delete the dot entirely, so anyone planning to connect a work inbox or a company drive should decide what to connect before setup rather than after.
Each product also carries a visible weakness from its first weeks on the market. Amazon blocked Muse’s shopping agent from its store within weeks of launch, which shows how quickly a consumer agent loses value when a major platform refuses to let it transact, and Meta’s plush mascot has already drawn criticism from child-safety groups for an adults-only product. OpenAI’s own DevDay demo stalled when a dot failed to respond on stage, and Ben Hylak, who had been using Dots for three or four days by launch day, said in a podcast discussion with Simon Willison that the product is not fully featured enough yet. Grok Bot, for its part, is still labelled a beta, its access terms changed within weeks of launch, and its shared Team Bots only arrived on 28 September, so its team features have had even less real-world use than Dots.
On paper, and based only on the companies’ own demos and documentation, the three agents are not really competing for the same person yet. Muse is the clearest fit for personal and small-business errands, Grok Bot is built most explicitly for teams that want several agents dividing up work, and Dots fits people whose backlog already sits inside ChatGPT, Codex and Slack. What the last 48 hours make clear is that none of them intends to stay in its lane, since Meta is pushing Muse toward business tools, SpaceXAI is pushing Grok Bot into shared team channels and OpenAI is promising teams of dots, so a comparison written six months from now will probably look very different from this one.
It depends on the job. Dots is built around ongoing work projects inside ChatGPT, Slack and Teams, while Muse is built around personal tasks such as bookings, purchases and email, with a free tier and WhatsApp access that Dots does not offer.
No. Dots is rolling out to ChatGPT Pro, which starts at $100 a month, and to Business Premium, with an admin-enabled beta for Enterprise, Edu and Healthcare workspaces. OpenAI says it plans to expand dots to more users but has not named Plus or given a date.
Muse has a free tier that Meta says covers most everyday use, plus two paid plans, Power at $20 a month and Maximum at $100 a month, which buy more usage rather than extra features. It is available in the US and Canada.
Grok Bot is the only one of the three that lets you set up and manage several named agents today, and its Team Bots beta lets a team share a bot inside Slack. Muse can split a task across subagents internally, but users manage a single Muse, while OpenAI launched Dots with one primary dot per user and describes teams of dots as a future plan.
Not on Pro plans at launch. OpenAI’s help documentation says Pro access excludes the European Economic Area, Switzerland and the UK, while Business Premium seats get Dots in every region where ChatGPT is supported.
Marko Nguyen
Marko is a tech journalist covering AI, consumer technology, crypto, and digital innovation. His work focuses on clear, accessible reporting that helps readers understand how new technologies are shaping business, finance, and everyday life.
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