OpenAI Teases European Rollout of Dots Assistant; Reports Twentyfold Growth in German Codex Users
At Berlin DevDay, OpenAI announced that its AI assistant Dots will roll out in Europe within weeks and claimed significant user growth for its coding tool Codex in Germany, underscoring a strategy to lock developers into its platform.
At the DevDay Exchange event in Berlin on October 28, 2026, Romain Huet, OpenAI's head of developer experience, stated that the company's AI assistant Dots is expected to become more widely available in Europe "in a few weeks" following talks with regulators. Currently, personal Pro accounts in the European Economic Area, Switzerland, and the UK remain locked out of the service, though certain business accounts have gained access. This timeline marks the latest progress in OpenAI's push to deploy its core agent products in regulated markets.
Huet also disclosed regional adoption data: according to OpenAI, weekly active users of Codex, the company's coding tool, have grown twentyfold in Germany since January 2026. Although the company did not provide absolute numbers, it noted that nearly one in five desktop users taps skills for documents, presentations, or spreadsheets, indicating that the coding tool is being used for general office work. In June, OpenAI had reported a sevenfold increase based on its own figures.
Beyond product updates, the event highlighted OpenAI's intent to lock developers and businesses more tightly into its infrastructure. With the Agents API, OpenAI runs the agent infrastructure itself, using plugins and web apps to offer developers distribution channels. The company emphasized its 1.2 billion weekly ChatGPT users, aiming to replicate an app store model where developers build apps and OpenAI supplies the infrastructure and traffic. While the underlying runtime, Codex Harness, remains open source, developers relying on managed services and platform-specific integrations may find it difficult to switch ecosystems later.
Regarding the lack of a model supporting video inputs and the shutdown of the Sora video generator, OpenAI management attributed these decisions to high resource costs and weak customer demand. The company stated that customers primarily want coding models and agents, so video features were not prioritized, but did not rule out bringing them back later.