With new acquisition, OpenAI signals plans to integrate deeper into the OS (arstechnica.com)

OpenAI has acquired Software Applications Incorporated (SAI), the small team behind Apple’s Shortcuts-era engineers and the Sky project, which builds a context-aware AI layer on macOS. Financial terms were not disclosed; SAI co-founders Ari Weinstein, Conrad Kramer and Kim Beverett will join OpenAI. The company says it will fold Sky’s deep macOS integration and product craft into ChatGPT, signaling an explicit push to move beyond chat and into operating‑system–level, context‑aware interfaces. Sky uses Apple APIs and accessibility hooks to supply an LLM with on‑screen context, letting users give plain‑language commands that the model turns into cross‑app actions or ephemeral workflows—no manual setup required. For the AI/ML community this matters because it’s a concrete step toward models that don’t just generate text but execute multi-application tasks with live UI context, which raises new technical priorities: robust UI parsing, runtime workflow synthesis, permissioning and sandboxing, latency/compute trade-offs between local and cloud inference, and stronger safety/privacy controls. The move also foreshadows tighter competition with platform automation tools and will prompt discussion about responsible access to accessibility APIs and user data as LLMs gain deeper OS-level capabilities.