OpenAI takes aim at Anthropic with beefed-up Codex that gives it more power over your desktop | TechCrunch

Last day to exhibit your breakthrough to 10,000+ tech leaders at Disrupt is on Oct 2. Book Exhibit Table Now. Disrupt doors open Oct. 13. Get your pass and bring someone with you at 50% off. REGISTER NOW. 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 dubbed the tool of choice for many businesses, as TechCrunch reported last week, but OpenAI isn’t giving up yet. This week, OpenAI announced a revamp 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 plethora of new features and updates, perhaps the most notable of which is that Codex can now operate in the background on your computer — opening any app on your desktop and carrying out operations with a cursor that clicks and types. Functionally, what this does is allow Codex to deploy multiple agents, all of which work on a user’s Mac “in parallel, without interfering with your own work in other apps,” the company said in a blog post. In other words, because of the way Codex runs in th