Tree automata are widely used in various contexts; and their emptiness problem is known to be decidable in polynomial time. Dag automata -- with or without labels -- are natural extensions of tree automata, which can also be used for solving problems. Our purpose in this work is to show that algebraically they behave quite differently: the class of dag automata is not closed under complementation, dag automata are not determinizable, their membership problem turns out to be NP-complete, and universality is undecidable; and proving emptiness is NP-complete even for deterministic labeled dag automata.