OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic with beefed-up Codex that gives it more power over your desktop

There is currently a low-grade war between OpenAI and Anthropic over who can release the most convenient and powerful AI-coding tools and, so far, Anthropic seems to be winning. Claude Code has been dubbed the tool of choice for many businesses, as TechCrunch reported last week, but OpenAI isn’t giving up yet.

This week, OpenAI announced a revamp of Codex, its own automated tool, with a variety of new updates designed to give it significantly expanded powers.

On Thursday, the company announced a plethora of new features and updates, perhaps the most notable of which is that Codex can now operate in the background on your computer — opening any app on your desktop and carrying out operations with a cursor that clicks and types.

Functionally, what this does is allow Codex to deploy multiple agents, all of which work on a user’s Mac “in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps,” the company said in a blog post. In other words, because of the way Codex runs in the background, a user can still be using the machine as the agent goes about its own work. The agent will then function, according to the company, as a kind of coding buddy that does auxiliary tasks while you work on topline projects. OpenAI’s lists “iterating on frontend changes, testing apps, or working in apps that don’t expose an API” as potential use cases for this kind of agentic assistance.

Overall, this agentic update and other new additions demonstrate OpenAI’s desire to not only make Codex a competitive coding assistant but also a more multifaceted tool that can be integrated into a variety of corporate workflows.

Watchers of the AI coding space will also note that some of the powers OpenAI is now adding to Codex seem to resemble those previously released by Anthropic for Claude Code. Last month, Anthropic announced that Claude and Cowork could remotely control your Mac and desktop on a user’s behalf while they were away from their keyboard.

In addition to the agentic tools, OpenAI’s Codex now has an in-app browser, which allows a user to issue commands to the agentic tool, which it will then ostensibly carry out on specific web applications. OpenAI says this function will be useful for front-end and game development, and that it plans to eventually expand the capability so that Codex can “fully command the browser beyond web applications on localhost.”

There are other updates. A new feature in preview called “memory” allows Codex to recall previous work sessions and generate important context about how a particular user works. The agent has also been given a new image-generation ability, which OpenAI says can be used to create product concepts, slide visuals, mockups, placeholder images, and other corporate paraphernalia. Finally, to expand Codex’s ability to get things done, the company has announced 111 plug-in integrations from apps like CodeRabbit and GitLab Issues, which allows Codex to carry out tasks involving those tools.

The way OpenAI has framed it, these plug-ins give Codex the ability to carry out minor clerical work to organize your work life. For example, if you want Codex to take a look at your Slack channels and Google calendar and give you a to-do list for a given day, OpenAI says that it can now do that for you.

A new pay-as-you-go Codex pricing option for ChatGPT enterprise and business customers has also been announced in an apparent effort to give users more flexibility when it comes to procuring the coding tool’s services.

Once considered the undisputed leader of its industry, OpenAI has more fiercely competed with Anthropic in recent months, with a focus on enterprise capabilities and a retreat from consumer tools like its social video app Sora 2. The company has also battled various controversies in recent months, including lawsuits over ChatGPT’s alleged mental health impact on some users.