OpenAI Is Developing a ‘Persistent’ AI Agent
Code reviewed by WIRED reveals the company is developing a feature that enables Codex to continue working proactively until it is “put to sleep.”
OpenAI is developing a proactive, highly persistent version of its flagship AI agent, Codex , WIRED has learned.
In recent days, OpenAI has started adding code for a new “Persistent mode” setting to its command line version of Codex, according to changes made to the product’s code base reviewed by WIRED. Changes to the Codex command line tool are made public by default, and new features tend to surface there before making their way to OpenAI’s other agent products, such as the Codex desktop app and ChatGPT Work.
Persistent mode has not been broadly rolled out or announced yet, but could be in the future. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to WIRED that the company is testing this feature, but said there are no immediate plans to launch it.
“OpenAI is a very bottoms up culture and many different things are explored on the open source repo which is a bit of our shared playground," said Thibault Sottiaux, OpenAI’s head of core products, in a statement to WIRED.
The feature appears to be OpenAI’s latest attempt to make AI agents that people will actually want to use . OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta are racing to deliver general-purpose agent products that will help people automate tasks across their work and personal lives, such as filing expense reports or scheduling doctor’s appointments. So far, the people who use AI agents are largely software engineers, but Silicon Valley believes the tech could be a major line of business with a much broader customer base.
Persistent mode appears in Codex’s “reasoning effort” menu, in which users can select the level of computing power, tokens, and time they want to allow for an AI model to “think” before answering a prompt. It seems to be one of OpenAI’s most computationally intensive settings. When users have selected Persistent mode, OpenAI’s code base reads that Codex will “continue working until put to sleep.” That’s a stark contrast to currently available modes, which will stop working on a task after a few minutes or hours, even if it’s not complete.
