OpenAI’s current Dots controls guide describes three separate stopping points. Pause stops the dot’s main task, while delegated work must be inspected and stopped in Activity. Recurring work has its own controls in Scheduled. The documentation explicitly says pausing does not stop every delegated task or cancel future runs. This is an analysis of existing documentation, not a newly announced change.
The companion tasks guide adds an important operational distinction: a completed run does not itself prove that the requested result was achieved or delivered. Together, these instructions suggest checking both what is still active and what has already happened. Neither stopping work nor deleting an assistant recalls messages or reverses changes already made in connected apps, according to the controls guide.
Editorial take: Treat an agent’s stop procedure as a short checklist rather than a single button. If a project is put on hold, review the current conversation, its delegated work and its recurring schedule, then inspect any completed output. That makes the boundary of a pause understandable without assuming every background responsibility shares the same switch.