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.
“Fundamentally, the agent is composed of the model, and then the harness that enables us to access your file system, make changes,” Sottiaux said. “There’s very little that is specific to coding.” A harness is a set of systems around an AI model that defines and controls how it can use tools, how it remembers things, and what guardrails it has.
Sottiaux described Codex’s core training as focused on “instruction following, understanding large amounts of data, finding its own context, and navigating the world in order to make decisions on its actions”—capabilities, he argued, that are as useful outside of code as within it.
Sottiaux said he was excited to work with Steinberger going forward. He called OpenClaw “a magical experience” and “a glimpse of the future,” but added that “it’s not something that everyone should just run on their machine unchecked.” Security researchers had found a number of serious vulnerabilities in using OpenClaw, and several users reported that the system had been subject to “prompt injection” attacks (where someone feeds an AI agent malicious instructions) that resulted in data breaches. Other users reported that OpenClaw could undertake unintended and damaging actions, such as deleting email accounts and other data.
OpenAI wants to take elements of OpenClaw’s approach but “package it in a way where everyone would be able to benefit from an always-on personal agent” and, hopefully, have much better security and safeguards, Sottiaux said.
Asked whether OpenAI’s widely reported internal “Code Red” had changed how his Codex team operated, Sottiaux was dismissive. “[Codex] is a really small team, and we’re firing on all cylinders,” he said. “We’ve been just really saying no to a lot of things from the get-go, and working on things that we think we’re uniquely good at doing, and then shipping continuously.”
The story around Codex’s surge has been largely eclipsed by the drama surrounding OpenAI’s controversial decision to make a deal with the Pentagon that will allow the Department of War to use OpenAI’s models in classified networks.
The deal, announced on Feb. 28, followed a breakdown in negotiations over a similar contract between the Department of War and Anthropic and hours after Secretary of War Pete Hegseth designated Anthropic a “supply-chain risk” in retaliation for Anthropic’s insisting that it would not sign a contract without specific limitations on the military using its Claude models for mass surveillance of Americans or to control autonomous weapons.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman had previously said he supported Anthropic’s redlines, and he noted that the company’s own contract with the Department of War included language designed to create the same limits, but legal experts questioned how effective that language would be. Altman later acknowledged the contract was “opportunistic and sloppy,” and the company has since renegotiated parts of the agreement.
Whether this consumer revolt is translating into any meaningful attrition among developers using Codex is not clear, however. App Store rankings reflect downloads of consumer chatbot apps—a different market from the professional developer audience that drives Codex usage.
News of OpenAI Codex’s growth also comes amid reports of surging business adoption for Anthropic’s products. Data released by Ramp, a software company that handles expense management, show that Anthropic’s market share of business AI chatbot invoices has climbed to more than 60% in February, from just over 10% a year earlier. Meanwhile, Ramp’s figures showed OpenAI’s business market share falling to about 35%, down from almost 90% the year before. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also told a conference this week that his company was operating at a $19 billion annualized revenue run rate, a figure that climbed by $6 billion in February.
It is unclear if OpenAI’s reported momentum for Codex can help arrest any decline in other areas of its business or reverse the narrative that it is losing enterprise market share to Anthropic.
