OpenAI Codex Hits 5M Weekly Users, Led by Office Workers
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- OpenAI's Codex has surpassed 5 million weekly active users, up 6x since the desktop app launched in February, the company said
- Knowledge workers now make up roughly 20% of Codex users and are growing more than 3x faster than developers, per a new OpenAI report shared first with Axios
- The fastest-growing knowledge worker tasks are data analysis (+110% week over week), research (+37%), and knowledge artifacts like reports, memos and spreadsheets (+36%), with 60%+ of users now running multiple Codex tasks simultaneously
- Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork were the first agentic tools to attract non-coders at scale; Anthropic released Claude Code as a CLI in February 2025 and a consumer-facing web version in October 2025
- Andrej Karpathy, now at Anthropic, said he had been in a 'state of AI psychosis' since December, while Rootly CTO Quentin Rousseau compared managing agents to 'watching a gripping TV series' that 'keeps you up all night'
- Stanford professor Andrew Hall used Claude Code to update a 5-year-old paper but found the tool 'made a number of errors' and 'very much needed an expert, Ph.D.-level student to oversee it quite closely'
- OpenAI is reframing Codex from a developer tool into 'an operating system for knowledge work' that connects to email, calendar, documents, Slack, Teams and design apps
Why it matters: OpenAI is repositioning Codex from a developer tool into a general-purpose knowledge work platform, and non-developers are adopting it roughly three times faster than its original target audience — but the burnout confessions and the Stanford audit showing the agent 'made a number of errors' suggest the 'operating system for knowledge work' branding outruns what the technology actually delivers without expert oversight.
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