OpenAI’s new Codex app hits 1M+ downloads in first week — but limits may be coming to free and Go users
Carl Franzen February 9, 2026 Credit: VentureBeat made with GPT-Image-1.5 on fal.aiIn a major milestone for the “AI coding wars,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman confirmed on X that the company’s standalone Codex application (currently only for Mac computers) surpassed 1 million downloads in its first week of availability, echoing the explosive growth of OpenAI’s hit chatbot ChatGPT after it first launched in late 2022.The surge reflects a 60% week-over-week growth in overall Codex users, following the February 2 launch of the app and the subsequent release of the underlying GPT-5.3-Codex model.While OpenAI is currently celebrating this rapid adoption, the company is signaling that the era of unlimited free access to its most powerful agentic tools is transitioning toward a more restricted…
