OpenAI says its seeing breakout growth for its AI coding tool Codex, even as controversy over the company’s agreement to supply AI to the Pentagon has derailed the public messaging around Codex’s momentum and resulted in some consumers boycotting its ChatGPT product.Since early February, when OpenAI launched GPT-5.3 Codex, the latest and most capable version of its coding agent, more than 1 million people have downloaded the codex desktop app and Codex now boasts more than 1.6 million active weekly users, a figure that has more than tripled with the release of the new model, according to the company. It also said that usage, as measured in the number of tokens, or portions of text, that Codex is processing per week has grown by a factor of five. Companies including Cisco, Nvidia, Ramp, Rakuten, and Harvey have rolled Codex out across their developer teams, according to OpenAI.In an interview in London last week, before the controversy over the Pentagon deal erupted, Thibault Sottiaux, the head of OpenAI’s Codex product, laid out the company’s ambitions to use Codex as a mechanism to bring agents to the enterprise in domains beyond coding.
Code as a tool that uses other tools
He described Codex as “becoming the standard agent” that OpenAI plans to expand across enterprise deployments, including for non-technical workers—though he acknowledged there is still significant work to do on security, managed deployments, and on-premises offerings.
