On Thursday, OpenAI announced that it is bringing Codex to the ChatGPT app on iOS and Android. It was previously only available on desktop, as a CLI tool, and on the web.
The way OpenAI is doing this is somewhat similar to what Anthropic is doing with Dispatch for Claude Cowork on mobile, but it also goes a few steps further.
The ChatGPT mobile app connects to a machine like a laptop, Mac Mini, or any other machine where Codex runs, including remote environments, and loads the current live state of that environment. Because of this, the app is always in sync with what you did on your desktop.
“A fully-featured mobile experience for getting work done with Codex.”
OpenAI describes this as a “fully-featured mobile experience for getting work done with Codex,” and, given its connection to a more powerful environment, it’s essentially an extension of that more than a standalone product.
This means Codex on mobile inherits all the capabilities of the desktop app, as well as all of the credentials, security policies, and other collateral that is available to the desktop app.
OpenAI stresses that the connection to the desktop runs through a relay layer “that keeps trusted machines reachable across devices without exposing them to the public internet.”
More than Dispatch
The company is obviously aware that people will compare this to Anthropic’s Dispatch and preemptively notes that “this is more than the ability to remotely control a single task or dispatch new tasks to your computer.” Instead, OpenAI says, this is about doing work across all your existing threads — something Dispatch in Cowork doesn’t allow for.
“This is more than the ability to remotely control a single task or dispatch new tasks to your computer.”
In Anthropic’s variant of this idea, Dispatch runs as a separate thread from the rest of what happens in Claude’s desktop app.
Codex now has more than 4 million weekly users, OpenAI says. And while the company opted to make Codex on desktop, the kernel of its super app that will combine its LLM tools and Atlas browser, on mobile, it opted not to launch a separate Codex app but is instead using the ChatGPT app to build its mobile version of the super app.
Availability
Codex in ChatGPT is now rolling out to all Codex users on iOS and Android, including those on free and Codex’s lowest-cost Go plans. To get access to it, though, you’ll need to make sure you update the mobile and Codex apps first.
One caveat: as of now, Codex on mobile only connects to Codex on the MacOS. Support for Windows is coming soon.
Also new: remote environments
There are a few other noteworthy Codex updates that launch with this release. Codex can now, for example, also connect to remote enterprise environments using a remote SSH connection. Many enterprises already use these to give developers remote machines that are often more powerful than their desktops, but they were typically hard to use with a desktop app like Codex.
Now, the environments will be accessible to all authorized ChatGPT devices and become part of the same security relay network that Codex on mobile also relies on.
Also new now are programmatic access tokens that bring scoped credentials to the ChatGPT workspace (available to Enterprise and Business users) and support for HIPAA-compliant use of Codex in the CLI, IDE, and Codex app (for Enterprise users and only when Codex is used in local environments).
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