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 named the tool of choice for many enterprises, as TechCrunch reported last week, but OpenAI isn’t giving up just yet.
This week, OpenAI announced a refresh 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 slew of new features and updates, perhaps the most notable of which is that Codex can now run in the background on your PC — opening any app on your PC and performing operations with a cursor that clicks and types.
Functionally, what this does is allow Codex to deploy multiple agents, which run on a user’s Mac “in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other applications,” 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 does its work. The agent will then act, according to the company, as a sort of coding buddy that does support tasks while you work on top-line projects. OpenAI lists “iterating on interface changes, testing apps, or working on apps that don’t expose an API” as possible use cases for this kind of agent assistance.
Overall, this agent update and other new additions demonstrate OpenAI’s desire to not only make Codex a competitive coding assistant, but also a more versatile tool that can be integrated into a variety of enterprise workflows.
Observers of the AI coding space will also note that some of the powers that OpenAI is now adding to Codex appear to be similar to those previously released by Anthropic for Claude Code. Last month, Anthropic announced that Claude and Cowork could remotely control your Mac and desktop on behalf of a user while away from their keyboard.
In addition to the agency tools, OpenAI’s Codex now has an in-app browser, which allows the user to issue commands to the agency tool, which will then ostensibly execute in specific web applications. OpenAI says this feature will be useful for front-end and game development, and that it plans to eventually expand the feature so that Codex can “completely power the browser beyond web applications on localhost.”
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There are other updates. A new feature in the preview called “memory” allows Codex to recall previous work sessions and create important context about how a particular user was operating. The agent also has a new image generation feature, which according to OpenAI can be used to create product ideas, visual slides, mockups, placeholder images and other corporate paraphernalia. Finally, to extend Codex’s ability to get things done, the company announced 111 integrations of plugins from apps like CodeRabbit and GitLab Issues, which allow Codex to perform tasks specific to those tools.
The way OpenAI has framed it, these plugins give Codex the ability to perform minor office tasks 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 it can now do that for you.
A new Pay-as-you-go Codex pricing option was also announced for ChatGPT enterprise and business customers in an apparent attempt to give users more flexibility in sourcing the codex tool’s services.
Once considered the undisputed leader of its industry, OpenAI has competed more fiercely with Anthropic in recent months, with a focus on business capabilities and a move away from consumer tools like 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.
