OpenAI Codex Can Now Drive a Mac While It's Locked

OpenAI has updated its Codex desktop agent so it can keep working on a Mac after the screen has been locked and the display has gone dark. The capability was announced on May 21, and is now rolling out to users of the Codex macOS app, according to MacRumors.

Under the hood, the feature uses an Apple authorization plug-in to grant Codex a temporary unlock window. The display stays covered, any local keyboard or trackpad input snaps the machine back to a locked state, and the authorization is time-bound rather than persistent. Macworld and The Mac Observer have walked through the security model in detail.

Six weeks of expansion

The locked-Mac feature is the latest in a fast sequence of upgrades. In six weeks this spring, Codex has gone from a sandboxed code-execution tool to a full desktop agent. It can operate apps with its own cursor, capture the screen to build context, run tasks on a schedule, and now be invoked from a phone while the user is away from their machine. Tech Times describes the trajectory as Codex becoming a peer of the operating system rather than a tenant inside it.

For developers used to leaving a laptop open overnight so a Codex job could finish, the practical upgrade is obvious. The agent can be sent a task from an iPhone, will hand itself the screen for the duration of the work, and will return control when finished or when the user picks the machine back up.

The trust question

Granting a software agent the ability to unlock a workstation is a category change in user trust, and one that will draw scrutiny. OpenAI's documentation says the unlock is scoped to active, user-initiated Codex turns and cannot be granted standing permission. Critics will point out that any policy of this kind depends on the agent never being subverted, since a compromised Codex with screen and input access has very few limits on what it can do.

The feature is opt-in. Macworld notes that the setting is off by default and requires the user to grant the authorization plug-in permission explicitly. For now it is limited to macOS, although OpenAI has signalled Windows support is on the roadmap.