OpenAI's Codex Now Runs Overnight While Your Mac Sleeps

OpenAI has been shipping Codex updates every Thursday, but this week's batch lands differently. The company dropped four features at once that, taken together, push Codex from an interactive coding assistant into something closer to a background process you delegate to and check on later. The headline is Locked Use, but the real story is how all four features combine.

Your Mac can sleep. Codex won't.

One of the longest-standing frustrations for AI agent users on macOS has been the lock screen. Leave your Mac unattended during a multi-hour coding task, and the screen locks, abruptly halting whatever the agent was doing. OpenAI's answer is a feature called Locked Use.

The feature uses an Apple authorization plug-in that temporarily unlocks the Mac with strict temporal and behavioral safeguards, letting developers trigger and monitor long-running agent tasks remotely from their phone. The security model is worth understanding before you enable it:

• OpenAI uses short-lived authorization tokens, not persistent access. Every display is covered while the Mac is temporarily unlocked for Codex, so nothing is visible to anyone nearby.
• Codex scopes locked use to active, trusted computer use turns and includes safeguards such as short-lived authorization, covered displays, relock on local input, and manual-unlock fallback.
• The feature cannot automate Terminal apps, Codex itself, or system-level admin prompts, preventing it from bypassing its own security policies.

It is unavailable in the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom, and Switzerland at launch. Anthropic brought Computer Use to the Claude Mac desktop apps earlier, but as of this release Claude still does not survive the lock screen, making OpenAI the first major coding agent to clear that barrier on macOS.