What Does CUA Stand For? — Sorting Out Computer-Using Agent, Computer Use, and Computer-Use Agents OpenAI's Computer-Using Agent (CUA), announced January 23, 2025 as the model powering the Operator research preview, scored 38.1% on OSWorld against a 72.4% human baseline, 58.1% on WebArena versus 78.2% for humans, and 87.0% on WebVoyager, according to the launch announcement. CUA combines GPT-4o's vision capabilities with reasoning trained through reinforcement learning and operates through a perception-reasoning-action loop of screenshots, chain-of-thought, and mouse-and-keyboard actions rather than OS- or web-specific APIs, asking users to confirm sensitive steps such as entering login details or answering CAPTCHAs. OpenAI said Operator was fully integrated into ChatGPT as ChatGPT agent on July 17, 2025, and the model was initially available to ChatGPT Pro users in the US with a planned API release for developers. What Does CUA Stand For? — Sorting Out Computer-Using Agent, Computer Use, and Computer-Use Agents Tadashi Shigeoka https://codenote.net/en/author/tadashi-shigeoka/ · Wed, September 30, 2026 After I started working with trycua/cua https://github.com/trycua/cua , an open-source Computer Use project, I kept running into the word “CUA.” It is in the repository name and in package names, so I vaguely took it as some Computer Use–related name and kept using it without checking what it stood for. When I finally went looking for something that explained CUA, I landed on OpenAI’s announcement “ Computer-Using Agent https://openai.com/index/computer-using-agent/ ” and realized that CUA is short for Computer-Using Agent. I suspect I’m not the only one who has been using the acronym without knowing its origin, so here is what I confirmed, organized as a short glossary. CUA Stands for Computer-Using Agent On January 23, 2025, OpenAI announced a research preview of Operator https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/ , an agent that performs tasks on the web on the user’s behalf. The model announced alongside it, as the one powering Operator, was Computer-Using Agent CUA Computer-Using Agent https://openai.com/index/computer-using-agent/ . Summarizing the announcement, CUA is a model that: - Combines GPT-4o’s vision capabilities with reasoning trained through reinforcement learning - Is trained to interact with GUIs buttons, menus, text fields on screen the way a person does - Performs tasks through a shared interface of screen, mouse, and keyboard, without OS- or web-specific APIs In other words, CUA originally names a specific OpenAI model. At launch, it was available to ChatGPT Pro users in the US through Operator, and the announcement said OpenAI planned to make it available to developers via the API. Operator’s announcement page has since been updated to say that, on July 17, 2025, Operator was fully integrated into ChatGPT as ChatGPT agent Introducing Operator https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/ . How CUA Works: A Perception, Reasoning, and Action Loop According to the announcement, once CUA receives a user’s instruction, it works through an iterative loop of perception, reasoning, and action: - Perception: a screenshot of the computer is added to the model’s context, giving it a snapshot of the current screen state - Reasoning: it uses chain-of-thought over current and past screenshots and actions to decide the next step - Action: it clicks, scrolls, types, and so on, until it decides the task is done or user input is needed For sensitive actions such as entering login details or answering a CAPTCHA, it asks the user for confirmation. php flowchart LR U "User instruction" -- P "Perception