OpenAI wants to make ChatGPT into a universal app front end (arstechnica.com)

At OpenAI Dev Days, CEO Sam Altman unveiled an SDK preview that lets developers "build real apps inside of ChatGPT," giving them full‑stack control over app data, action triggers and interactive UIs that can appear inline in a ChatGPT conversation. The SDK is built on the open‑source Model Context Protocol (MCP), so existing MCP users can enable ChatGPT integration by adding an HTML resource. Live demos showed the LLM "talking to apps"—exposing app context back to ChatGPT so it can, for example, turn a Figma sketch into a diagram inside the chat, generate a Spotify playlist when asked for song suggestions, or expand on content from an embedded Coursera video without the user explaining what’s on screen. The move positions ChatGPT as a universal app frontend and a composable UI layer across third‑party services, potentially changing how people interact with tools by letting the model recommend, control and augment apps directly within conversations. For developers this lowers integration friction and enables richer, stateful experiences (interactive embeds, overlays, background tasks). It also raises practical considerations around data permissions, security and UX consistency as apps expose live context to an LLM—issues that will shape adoption and regulation as this in‑chat app ecosystem grows.