itstargetnews
OpenAI is launching a Codex App, a desktop experience for managing the company’s AI coding tools, as the competitive pressure to deploy autonomous AI agents heats up.
The desktop app is designed to be more intuitive than previous versions of Codex, potentially broadening Codex’s appeal beyond the software engineers who have been its primary users until now.
OpenAI’s move follows rival Anthropic’s debut of a similar application for the popular Claude coding assistant, called Code Cowork, in January. Like the new Codex App, Claude Cowork is designed for non-software developers to start using Claude to build AI agents that work across the software they already have installed on their computer.
OpenAI’s Codex tool has already been credited with some productivity gains. Independent developer Peter Steinberger, creator of the now viral AI tool OpenClaw (which spawned a “social network for AI agents” Moltbook), said in a post on X that his productivity has almost doubled since switching to OpenAI’s Codex. Steinberger said he built the entire OpenClaw tool using OpenAI’s Codex, despite saying publicly that Anthropic’s Claude Opus is “the best general-purpose agent” and the model OpenClaw recommends for use.
Codex is also being used within OpenAI to build new features and products. According to the company, a four-person engineering team built and Sora is now available for Android app for just 28 days using Codex.
With the Codex App, OpenAI appears to be trying to empower users in the developer tools market. The company says more than a million developers used Codex last month, including teams at startups like Harvey and Sierra as well as large enterprises like Cisco.
But OpenAI is in an increasingly cutthroat battle with Anthropic and Google to be the platform on which software developers—and others as well—build new software applications. It’s supposed to be anthropic surpasses OpenAI in enterprise adoption—although OpenAI disputes some of that data—and is positioning itself as a business AI company first and a consumer one second. Claude Code is now used by major companies including Uber, Netflix, Spotify, Salesforce, Accentureand Snowflake, according to Anthropic.
OpenAI is betting that developers want centralized control over agent workflows. The new app allows users to run multiple AI agents simultaneously on different projects, automate repetitive tasks, and monitor what the agents are doing. The company now recommends using the GPT-5.2-Codex model for coding projects and GPT-5.2 for analysis and writing tasks, with adjustable thinking intensity and personality options.
