By launching a desktop app, OpenAI is catching up to Anthropic’s popular Claude Code, which already offered a macOS version. Whether the desktop app makes sense compared to the existing interfaces depends a little bit on who you are and how you intend to use it.

OpenAI is trying to win market share from rivals like Anthropic and Cursor as AI coding tools gain in popularity.

OpenAI is locked in an increasingly intense battle with rival Anthropic over tools to create AI agents. The debut of the Codex app comes weeks after Anthropic launched a similar Claude Cowork product.

OpenAI launches Codex desktop app for AI coding, enabling multi-agent workflows, skills, and expanded access for ChatGPT users.

The app gives developers a centralized workspace to manage multiple AI coding agents across projects without losing task context, OpenAI said.

The app is powered by GPT-5.2-Codex, OpenAI’s newest programming-focused large language model. It can process prompts with up to 400,000 tokens, which corresponds to about 100,000 lines of code, and understands over 50 programming languages. Users can also upload multimodal input such as interface sketches.

OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code did for programming.