OpenAI's dot assistant, an always-on agentic assistant, can be surprisingly active even when no one is using it. Security and governance firm Geordie tested dot and found that a single instance produced 155 activity traces and consumed more than 300,000 tokens in one day, all without a single user prompt.
Geordie gave dot read-only permissions and did not connect it to email, Slack, or other personal apps. Despite that, the agent went into research mode, surveyed systems, and spun up short-lived subagents to check code repositories and inventory data. According to Geordie's chief AI officer, Hanah-Marie Darley, dot always runs at least two agents: one that interacts with the user and another that continuously collects background data.
Token costs vary by subscription and model, but roughly 200,000 tokens on OpenAI's Astra model cost between $5 and $10. Darley noted that personal agents like dot set more of their own tasks than enterprise agents, and users may not realize how much background activity is happening on their behalf.