ChatGPT's Computer History logs what you do on your Mac

OpenAI shipped a feature that turns the ChatGPT desktop app into a recorder of your workday. ChatGPT Computer History builds a timeline of what you did on your Mac and hands it to ChatGPT and Codex as context. It is off by default and, on Business and Enterprise plans, an admin has to unlock it first. That admin decision is the whole story — make it deliberately, before someone in your company makes it for you.

What actually happened

Per OpenAI's documentation, Computer History records interaction events — clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, and app switches — across apps and websites you allow, using macOS accessibility permissions. It explicitly does not capture screenshots, screen recordings, microphone input, system audio, or private-mode browsing. 9to5Mac notes it replaces Chronicle, an earlier research preview that worked from screenshots.

The storage model is the part worth reading twice. Raw event files sit locally in the app's container and auto-delete after 48 hours. The memories generated from them are plain-text Markdown written to ~/.codex/memories/extensions/skysight/, and they persist until you delete them. The feature does not encrypt them. Clearing history removes both the events and the memories built from them, in 10-minute, hourly, daily, or full increments.

It is macOS-only, limited to Pro, Business, and Enterprise, requires the Memories feature, and needs admin approval under Workspace Settings → Permissions & roles — which grants permission to opt in, not the feature itself. OpenAI's own warning: the feature "can increase prompt-injection risk from malicious content in apps or websites," and it recommends pausing collection during private conversations.

Why it matters for your business

The upside is real. Computer History can spot a repeated workflow and offer to turn it into a reusable skill or a scheduled task — that is SOP capture from actual work instead of from a document nobody wrote. For a small team, that is the cheapest process documentation you will ever get.

The exposure is equally real, and it is not the recording. It is that an unencrypted plain-text file on a laptop now summarizes what your bookkeeper, your ops lead, or your founder did all morning — and that a hostile web page inside an allowed site is now upstream of an agent that can act.

Set three things before you flip the admin switch: an allowlist of apps and sites narrow enough that payroll, banking, and your password manager are never in it; a rule that the memories directory is treated as sensitive on any machine covered by disk encryption and backup policy; and a named owner who reviews what got captured. Then turn it on for one person and read the output before anyone else gets it.

Sources: OpenAI, 9to5Mac.