OpenAI's Operator scored 38% on real computer tasks — and panics instead of recovering from errors

OpenAI launched Operator, its computer-using agent, in January 2025; six months later it scored 38% on OSWorld, a benchmark of real computer tasks — roughly two of every five tasks fail. Beyond the raw success rate, the more damaging finding is error recovery: when a step goes wrong, computer-use agents tend to panic, double down on the wrong action, ignore error messages, and fail to retry a different way. Because these agents act in the real world, the failure surface includes purchasing the wrong item, sending the wrong email to a customer, or permanently deleting a document. OpenAI's own mitigation — training the agent to ask for confirmation before finalizing side-effectful actions like orders and emails — is an admission that unsupervised autonomy at current reliability is unsafe for consequential tasks.