SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI introduced Chronicle, a research preview for its Codex agent that captures user screen images to give the AI more context and reduce the need for users to restate their work.
Chronicle is opt-in and available only in the Codex app for macOS. It feeds screen captures to the Codex agent so the AI can follow ongoing user activity.
Screen captures are stored on-device for six hours. Data extracted from those images through optical character recognition can persist longer as text-based Markdown memories, stored unencrypted on the user's device. OpenAI's documentation says selected screenshot data is also sent to its servers to generate those local memories.
OpenAI's own documentation flags several risks: Chronicle consumes Codex rate limits quickly, raises the risk of prompt injection through screen captures containing malicious instructions, and stores user memories unencrypted.
The launch draws direct comparisons to Microsoft's 2024 Windows feature, Recall, which also took screenshots of a user's desktop every few seconds and saved them to disk to give Copilot services more contextual data.
The cybersecurity community criticized Recall as a keylogger and a privacy liability. The backlash prompted Microsoft to revise the feature. Browser maker Brave later offered Recall screenshot blocking; its own tests found Recall saving images of sensitive data, including credit card numbers and passwords, despite Microsoft's filters.
Security researcher Michael Taggart said OpenAI had "reinvented Recall, but for macOS," pointing to the similar technical approach and the same privacy vulnerabilities.
OpenAI is betting that richer context improves model utility enough to justify those risks — a trade-off Microsoft already learned is a hard sell to users who care about data security.
