This is the ambient-AI future being sold as productivity: continuous surveillance of your digital life, rebranded as convenience, available for a mere $100 a month. OpenAI promises it won't train on the data. Do you trust them? ? Patrick Wood, Editor.

Summary: OpenAI's Codex for Mac has added Chronicle, a research preview feature that periodically captures screenshots, sends them to OpenAI's servers for processing, and stores text summaries as local unencrypted Markdown files to give the AI assistant passive context about user activity. The feature is unavailable in the EU, UK, and Switzerland, requires a $100+/month Pro subscription and Apple Silicon, and represents OpenAI's first implementation of ambient screen-aware AI on desktop, choosing cloud processing and utility over the local-first privacy architecture adopted by competitors like Screenpipe and the now-defunct Rewind AI.

OpenAI's Codex desktop app for Mac has gained a feature called Chronicle that periodically captures your screen, processes the content into text summaries, and stores those summaries as local memory files that give the AI assistant context about what you have been working on. The feature, released as a research preview, means Codex can now understand your recent activity without you having to explain it. It also means OpenAI is sending screenshots of your desktop to its servers for processing, a design choice that puts Chronicle in direct tension with the privacy-first direction that much of the industry has been moving toward.

Chronicle is part of a broader update that transformed Codex from a coding assistant into a general-purpose AI workspace. The 16 April release, titled "Codex for (almost) everything," added computer use capabilities that allow Codex to operate Mac apps with its own cursor, an in-app browser, image generation, persistent memory, and more than 90 plugins. Over one million developers have used Codex, and usage doubled following the launch of the GPT-5.2-Codex model in December.