OpenAI is actively developing a novel, highly persistent AI agent, a significant departure from its current offerings of Codex, according to WIRED’s latest reporting.
Recent changes to the Codex command line tool, visible through changes made to the product’s code base reviewed by WIRED, indicate the introduction of a new “Persistent mode.” This setting, initially tested on the Codex desktop app and ChatGPT Work, allows for a more continuous, proactive interaction with the AI.
An OpenAI spokesperson, Thibault Sottiaux, confirmed that the company is conducting rigorous testing of this feature, but explicitly states that there are no immediate plans for widespread deployment. The spokesperson stated, “OpenAI is a very bottoms-up culture, and many different things are explored on the open-source repository which is a bit of our shared playground,” highlighting the collaborative nature of the development process.
The feature appears to be a key component of OpenAI’s strategy to create AI agents that users will genuinely want to use. This aligns with broader industry trends, where companies like Anthropic and Meta are racing to deliver general-purpose agents capable of automating tasks across diverse areas, including expense reporting and doctor’s appointments. Currently, the users of AI agents largely consist of software engineers, but Silicon Valley believes the technology holds considerable potential for a significantly broader customer base.
The implementation of Persistent mode is notably positioned within Codex’s reasoning effort menu, enabling users to select computational power, token limits, and time constraints for the AI to ‘think’ before answering a prompt. Notably, it seems to function by instructing the AI to continue working until put to sleep – a stark contrast to existing modes which typically cease operation after a few minutes or hours, regardless of completion.
Furthermore, a feature called ‘proactivity’ is integrated into the Persistent mode, instructing the AI to proactively create follow-up tasks for itself. This system prompt instructs the agent to work on those tasks across sessions and utilize past user interactions and ‘knowledge of the user’ to determine the task to focus on. It also includes a tool for the agent to send messages without being asked, but is instructed to sparingly do so.
In recent podcasts and private investor meetings, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has emphasized OpenAI’s ambition to transform ChatGPT into a proactive, always-on AI agent. This transformation is intended to drive up adoption of the company’s most advanced AI models, which today are used by only a fraction of ChatGPT’s total user base.
The company has also acknowledged heightened risks associated with persistence – in a technical report published this week, OpenAI stated that the Hugging Face hacking incident was primarily driven by an internal-only research model trained to be highly persistent. The company says it has since taken this specific model offline. Nonetheless, OpenAI says it has trained other forthcoming AI models, including Astra, to enable persistent agents.
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Source: Wired
