ChatGPT Pets go social: custom pets now ship as a link

OpenAI's pixel-art companions just got a social layer. Custom Pets built on ChatGPT web can now be handed out with a link: Settings > Personalisation > Copy Link. Whoever opens it can adopt your creature into their own interface. Web-only at launch — the desktop app and Codex CLI don't do sharing yet.

Pets started life in Codex back in May, as a desktop sprite that floats over your windows and reacts to what the agent is doing: scratching its head while thinking, popping a speech bubble when a task lands. They're purely cosmetic and surface four states — Running, Needs input, Ready, Blocked — with input-needed chats prioritised. Rolling your own means a transparent PNG or WebP at exactly 1536 × 1872 px, under 20 MiB, uploaded from the same Personalisation panel. Note the gap: pets created in the desktop app live locally and don't sync to web, so the shareable ones have to be made in the browser.

It's a small feature with an obvious shape — user-generated assets plus a distribution link is how you get a marketplace without building one. Expect custom pets to leak into workplace ChatGPT next; OpenAI has already teased team pets in its ChatGPT Work push.

Why it matters: OpenAI is quietly turning a status indicator into a shareable object — the cheapest kind of network effect there is.