Summary: OpenAI’s Codex for Mac has added Chronicle, a research preview feature that periodically captures screenshots, sends them to OpenAI’s servers for processing, and stores text summaries as local unencrypted Markdown files to give the AI assistant passive context about user activity. The feature is unavailable in the EU, UK, and Switzerland, requires a $100+/month Pro subscription and Apple Silicon, and represents OpenAI’s first implementation of ambient screen-aware AI on desktop, choosing cloud processing and utility over the local-first privacy architecture adopted by competitors like Screenpipe and the now-defunct Rewind AI.

OpenAI’s Codex desktop app for Mac has gained a feature called Chronicle that periodically captures your screen, processes the content into text summaries, and stores those summaries as local memory files that give the AI assistant context about what you have been working on. The feature, released as a research preview, means Codex can now understand your recent activity without you having to explain it. It also means OpenAI is sending screenshots of your desktop to its servers for processing, a design choice that puts Chronicle in direct tension with the privacy-first direction that much of the industry has been moving toward.

Chronicle is part of a broader update that transformed Codex from a coding assistant into a general-purpose AI workspace. The 16 April release, titled “Codex for (almost) everything,” added computer use capabilities that allow Codex to operate Mac apps with its own cursor, an in-app browser, image generation, persistent memory, and more than 90 plugins. Over one million developers have used Codex, and usage doubled following the launch of the GPT-5.2-Codex model in December.

How Chronicle works

Chronicle runs background agents that periodically capture screenshots of your display. Those screenshots are sent to OpenAI’s servers, where they are processed using OCR and visual analysis to generate text summaries. The summaries are saved as Markdown files in a local directory at ~/.codex/memories_extensions/chronicle/. When you subsequently prompt Codex, those memory files are included in its context window, allowing it to understand what applications you were using, what documents you were reading, what code you were writing, and what conversations you were having, all without you restating any of it.

The raw screen captures are stored temporarily under a system temp directory and automatically deleted after six hours. OpenAI states that screenshots are not stored on its servers after processing and are not used for training. The generated memories, however, persist indefinitely as unencrypted plain text files on your machine.

Greg Brockman, OpenAI’s president, described the feature as “an experimental feature giving Codex the ability to see and have recent memory over what you see, automatically giving it full context on what you’re doing. Feels surprisingly magical to use.”

The privacy architecture

Chronicle requires macOS Screen Recording and Accessibility permissions. It is available only on Apple Silicon Macs running macOS 14 or later, and only to ChatGPT Pro subscribers paying $100 or more per month. It is not available in the EU, UK, or Switzerland, a geographic restriction that strongly suggests OpenAI recognises the feature’s incompatibility with GDPR’s requirements around data minimisation and purpose limitation.

The comparison with Microsoft Recall is instructive. Recall, which launched on Windows Copilot+ PCs, takes screenshots every few seconds and stores them in an encrypted local database, with all processing handled by a neural processing unit on the device. No screenshot data leaves the machine. Chronicle takes the opposite approach: processing happens in the cloud, but only text summaries are retained locally. Recall encrypts its database and requires biometric authentication via Windows Hello. Chronicle stores its memories as unencrypted Markdown files accessible to any process running on the computer.

OpenAI’s own documentation acknowledges the risks explicitly. Chronicle “increases risk of prompt injection” because malicious content on a website you visit could be captured in a screenshot and interpreted as instructions by the AI. The memories directory “might contain sensitive information.” And the feature “uses rate limits quickly,” meaning Pro subscribers may find their Codex usage constrained by Chronicle’s background activity.

OpenAI recommends pausing Chronicle before meetings or when viewing sensitive content. Users can pause and resume via the Codex menu bar icon. The recommendation is itself revealing: it acknowledges that the feature will capture things it should not, and shifts the burden of managing that risk to the user.

The category and its casualties

Screen-aware AI assistants have had a turbulent history. Rewind AI, the most prominent early entrant, rebranded to Limitless before being acquired by Meta in December 2025. The Mac app was shut down and screen capture disabled. Microsoft’s Copilot has lost 39% of its subscribers in six months, partly due to trust issues that extend to Recall. A security researcher demonstrated in early 2026 that Recall’s encrypted database could still be exploited, reinforcing concerns that had dogged the feature since its announcement.

The open-source alternative Screenpipe offers a local-first approach: continuous screen and audio capture processed entirely on-device, with a $400 lifetime licence and no recurring cloud dependency. Perplexity’s Personal Computer software takes yet another approach, turning a Mac mini into a persistent AI agent with access to local files and apps, though it too relies on cloud processing for its core intelligence.

The pattern across the category is consistent: the more useful a screen-aware AI becomes, the more data it needs to process, and the harder it becomes to reconcile that data appetite with user privacy. Chronicle opts for utility over privacy architecture, betting that OpenAI’s promise not to store or train on the data, combined with the six-hour deletion window, is sufficient to earn user trust. Whether that bet pays off depends entirely on whether users believe the promise and whether OpenAI can maintain it as the feature scales.

The ambient computing context

Chronicle arrives as the industry converges on the idea that AI assistants should understand your context without being told. Apple is testing AI smart glasses designed as ambient input channels for Apple Intelligence. Slack’s recent AI overhaul turned Slackbot into a desktop agent with deep context about your work communications. OpenAI itself is developing a screenless hardware device with Jony Ive that is explicitly positioned for an “ambient AI” era. Gartner predicts more than 40% of large enterprises will deploy ambient intelligence pilots by 2026.

The thesis is that AI becomes dramatically more useful when it has passive, continuous access to what you are doing rather than requiring you to articulate your needs from scratch each time. Chronicle is OpenAI’s first implementation of that thesis on desktop, and it works: by Brockman’s account and the feature’s design, eliminating the need to re-explain context to an AI assistant is a genuine productivity gain.

But the thesis has a cost. Privacy-first alternatives like Proton’s AI tools demonstrate that useful AI can run on open-source models locally without sending user data to anyone’s servers. The question Chronicle poses is not whether screen-aware AI is useful. It plainly is. The question is whether the cloud-processed, trust-dependent model that OpenAI has chosen will survive contact with the regulatory environment that has already excluded it from three jurisdictions, and with users who have watched enough AI companies promise data privacy only to quietly revise their terms when the economics demanded it.

For the first time, AIM is expanding beyond its Sligo-based headquarters, to target additional ‘industry clusters’ in the west of Ireland.

The Advancing Innovation in Manufacturing (AIM) Centre in Sligo, which is a collaborative partnership between the Atlantic Technological University, Sligo County Council and Leitrim County Council, has announced an expansion with a new Galway base of operations. 

The AIM Centre intends to strengthen its links within the medtech and life sciences sectors and for the first time will expand outside of Sligo. The centre is also currently recruiting for specialist roles in both the Galway and Sligo facilities. 

AIM focuses on business transformation, supporting companies across manufacturing operations, supply chain, HR, legal, energy, data and decision-making. The centre also supports the services sector, “recognising the increasing demand for practical AI adoption and data-driven transformation beyond manufacturing”.

The expansion was supported by the Western Development Commission, with the new base to be located out of Wellpark Road in Galway city. AIM has stated that the decision to join the hubs is part of the organisation’s “growth strategy, a key plank of which is developing links with key industry clusters”.

As part of the expansion, AIM is planning a range of events intended to boost engagement in Galway in the coming months. For example, towards the end of April, the organisation will have a stand at the Dexcom Stadium for the MedTech Innovation expo, bringing together exhibitors and expert speakers to showcase new technologies and research in the healthcare space. 

AIM Centre will also be in attendance at the AtlanTec Festival conference in May. Tech companies from the AtlanTec Gateway and globally, will be present throughout the festival, demonstrating how technology is transforming businesses and society.

Commenting on the announcement, David Bermingham, the director of AI at AIM Centre, said: “The move to open our first Galway hub is designed to strengthen our national reach. We already work with companies across Ireland, but having a base in Galway allows us to be closer to key sectors like medtech and life sciences, where there is strong demand for what we do.

“The AIM Centre’s strength is that we look at the entire business. We work with companies to understand where AI and digital technologies can deliver real impact, from operations and energy through to strategy and decision-making. It’s not about technology for the sake of it. It’s about solving real business problems. We are also seeing growing demand from the services sector, and this expansion allows us to support a broader range of organisations in adopting AI in a practical and meaningful way.”

Méabh Conaghan, the regional director at Enterprise Ireland, added: “Enterprise Ireland is committed to supporting Irish companies to adopt digital and AI technologies that enhance productivity, competitiveness and sustainability. 

“The expansion of the AIM Centre to collaborate with CREW in Galway, another regional enterprise development centre, strengthens the regional and national AI support ecosystem. This development will bring expertise closer to key industrial clusters while continuing to support manufacturers and services companies nationwide in applying AI in a practical way.”

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from the a-very-bad-bet dept

Earlier this month, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that “Palantir Technologies (PLTR) has proven to have great war fighting capabilities and equipment. Just ask our enemies!!!” — notably including the stock ticker, because why not just make the market manipulation explicit.

The stock popped after that and has continued to rise in the past couple weeks, though it’s still down on the year.

Welcome to patronage capitalism with a stock ticker attached.

Last year, we wrote about the disturbing trend of tech founders and VCs nodding along to the neoreactionary pitch that democracy is holding back innovation, and that what the industry really needs is a “tech-friendly” strongman to sweep away institutional guardrails. We argued this was both morally bankrupt and strategically suicidal, since real innovation requires exactly the kind of stable, open, competitive institutions that authoritarianism systematically destroys.

Palantir has apparently decided to volunteer as the case study. Palantir — the very company whose entire sales pitch is built around using technology to make better strategic decisions and predict how things will play out.

But now the company seems to be betting that Trumpist-flavored authoritarianism is a permanent feature of the American political landscape — and that going all-in on it will never, ever have any long-term consequences.

Over the weekend, the company’s official account posted what it called a “brief” 22-point summary of CEO Alex Karp’s book The Technological Republic, framed as an introduction to the “philosophy” behind Palantir’s work. Most of it is a reheated version of the familiar Thiel-adjacent playbook — Silicon Valley owes a debt to the country, we must build AI weapons before our adversaries do, the iPhone has made us soft — the kind of thing that gets nodded along to at certain conferences and immediately forgotten.

But a few points deserve to be called out. First, there is the quite telling series of bullet points effectively saying that famous people shouldn’t be subject to public criticism because it means they might not want to help save you piddling simpletons.

We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.

[….]

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The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.

This is the same Harpers Letter-style nonsense where people who deem themselves to be great thinkers or great men of history find it horrifying that the public might call them on their bullshit. I mean, sure, we should show more grace in general to lots of people, but these fragile-minded billionaires keep acting like because some wacko on social media calls them on their bullshit pronouncements it’s the end of the world.

But it gets way worse from there. Buried near the end are points 21 and 22, which are insane, and should make anyone who continues to work with or for Palantir radioactive:

Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.

We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?

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Strip away the corporate-academic language and you’re left with a very old, very problematic argument: certain cultures — and we all know which ones they are claiming are supposedly the “middling” and “regressive” ones — are inferior, and the pursuit of inclusivity has been a civilizational error. That framing — some cultures produce wonders, others are regressive and harmful, pluralism is a civilizational threat — has been used to justify exclusion, hierarchy, and far worse for over a century. And while internet fascists like to think of it as edge lord contrarianism today, to most people it just comes across as a shiny coat of paint on historical bigotries and ignorance.

Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, sarcastically pointed out that it was “extremely normal and fine for a company to put this in a public statement.” In a much longer and more thoughtful thread on this, he made a key point:

This is the publicly endorsed worldview of a company that is rapidly becoming load-bearing infrastructure for the federal government’s surveillance and enforcement apparatus, and it contains arguments that would be at home in a white nationalist pamphlet.

Palantir has always been a bit creepy and cultlike in their worship of government power. Years back I debated one of its founders regarding Google employees convincing the company to drop out of a government AI surveillance effort, Project Maven. He insisted that those employees were naive and Google was weak for backing down. Of course, Google’s decision to leave Project Maven turned out to be a huge win for Palantir, who effectively took it over in Google’s place.

But back then, Palantir at least played the game of pretending to care about cultural diversity and pluralism. As Chris Person pointed out, until fairly recently, Palantir had employee resource groups called Palamigos, PalaNoir, PalanQueer, PalanGender Queer, the Palantir Interfaith Network, PalAPI, and PalNoir. The company celebrated exactly the kind of pluralism and multicultural identity that Karp’s manifesto now denounces as “shallow” and “vacant.”

And yes, they even pretended they had a pro-DEI stance:

At least now we see what happens when they feel they can go full mask off.

With Trump in power, Karp apparently feels free to discard the diversity framing the company used for years to recruit employees and just say the quiet part out loud.

The apparent hope is to use Trump’s support over the next few years to permanently weave themselves into the federal government’s tech stack. The NY Times last year talked about how Palantir’s Foundry is becoming the connective tissue for federal data:

The push has put a key Palantir product called Foundry into at least four federal agencies, including D.H.S. and the Health and Human Services Department. Widely adopting Foundry, which organizes and analyzes data, paves the way for Mr. Trump to easily merge information from different agencies, the government officials said.

Creating detailed portraits of Americans based on government data is not just a pipe dream. The Trump administration has already sought access to hundreds of data points on citizens and others through government databases, including their bank account numbers, the amount of their student debt, their medical claims and any disability status.

Palantir has made itself ideologically and technically indispensable to one specific administration’s political project — which happens to include mass deportation, data consolidation on citizens, and the kinds of enforcement actions that require exactly the ideological framework Karp just publicly endorsed.

Meanwhile, the even more recent $10 billion Army contract consolidates 75 separate contracts into a single decade-long enterprise deal.

Supporters of Palantir will likely argue that it sounds like this “embrace fascism” strategy is working great. The company is signing these rich contracts and getting its technology deep within the infrastructure of the federal government. And, yes, you could say that these are short term wins (even if the stock price is kinda lagging).

But these things cut both ways. When your value to the government is primarily ideological alignment with a specific political project, you become a clear and visible target the moment that project loses power.

One of the many problems with fascism as a business strategy is that it only works if the fascists stay in power indefinitely. It’s a woefully unpopular ideological position, especially in the US — betting on a temporarily ascendant horse that has no chance in a longer race.

But Karp and Palantir have bet the farm that either Trumpism will remain a powerful force within the government or that they will be so deeply buried in the systems that it would be effectively impossible to rip them out when more grounded leadership enters the picture.

That’s an incredibly risky bet, and one I doubt will pay off.

Karp has made sure that he and his company have become ideologically toxic to a non-fascist government. A future non-Trumpist administration will have tremendous reputational incentive to very visibly rip out Palantir, as a signal that the prior regime’s infrastructure is being dismantled.

This is exactly the trap we warned about last year when we wrote about Silicon Valley’s embrace of fascism for short-term gain. Contractual dependency you can unwind. But you’ve told everyone in public what you are, and you can’t walk that back when the winds shift.

And the winds do shift. Companies that tied themselves to nationalist or authoritarian regimes throughout the 20th century tend not to have great long-term track records as independent entities. Some survive — though often in name only, most heavily restructured, with decades of reputational rehabilitation to follow. When you make yourself a load-bearing pillar of a specific regime’s specific project, your fate becomes tied to that regime’s fate.

Then there’s the talent question. The piece we wrote last year noted that authoritarianism drives brain drain — that foreign students, researchers, and the global talent pool that has always fed American innovation are already heading elsewhere. Palantir just published a document telling the world, in effect, that a diverse workforce is “shallow” and “vacant” and that some cultures are “regressive.” The engineers who have options — and the best ones always do — just got a very clear signal about whether they should take Palantir’s recruiter call.

There’s a version of Palantir’s business that doesn’t require publishing a white-nationalism-adjacent manifesto. You can sell analytical software to the federal government without announcing that pluralism is a mistake and that some cultures are regressive. Plenty of defense contractors manage it. The business didn’t force the decision to publish those 22 points. It was a choice to double down on ideological signaling, presumably because Karp and company have calculated that visible loyalty gets rewarded in the current environment.

And perhaps it earned some cheers from the remaining trolls on X, for whatever that’s worth.

But it’s a recipe for disaster over the long haul, which seems odd for a company whose entire sales pitch is based around the ability to use its tech to get great insights into how strategic decisions will play out.

This is exactly the warning we gave tech founders last year. The pitch that democracy is messy and slow, that innovation really needs someone who “gets it” cutting red tape, leads directly and predictably here: first you justify the pragmatism of cutting red tape, then you’re chasing the contracts, then drafting the manifestos, until your stock price depends on friendly presidential posts and your long-term viability depends on a political coalition never losing power.

Palantir has decided this is its business model. The rest of the industry should watch very carefully what happens next. Because the thing about tying yourself to a regime isn’t that it never works. It’s that when it stops working, it stops working all at once — and you’ve burned every other option on the way there.

Filed Under: alex karp, donald trump, fascism, silicon valley

Companies: palantir

Over the weekend in China, a humanoid robot shattered world half-marathon record—the human record—by seven minutes.

The star performer was a robot developed by the Chinese company Honor (the smartphone maker), which finished the 13.1-mile race in 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The human record, set by Ugandan Olympic medalist Jacob Kiplimo, is 57 minutes, 20 seconds. The result marks an impressive milestone especially considering that, just a year earlier, the fastest robot at this half-marathon event took two and a half hours to complete the same distance.

But Honor’s robot was not the only participant. The event consisted of more than 100 humanoid robots from 76 institutions across China. The robots lined up alongside 12,000 human runners in Beijing’s E-Town, albeit on separate courses to avoid accidents. The contrast in performance between humans and robots was more than evident.

Run, Robot, Run

A humanoid robot is designed to mimic the structure and movement of the human body, with legs, arms, and sensors that allow it to interact with its environment. In this case, the winning robot incorporated features inspired by elite runners: long legs (almost a meter), advanced balance systems, and a liquid cooling mechanism, similar to that of smartphones, to prevent overheating during the race.

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In addition, many of the participating robots operated autonomously, meaning without direct human control. Thanks to artificial intelligence algorithms, they could adjust their pace, maintain balance, and adapt to the terrain in real time. Notably, the Honor robot that achieved the 50-minute mark operated autonomously. The Chinese manufacturer presented another robot, operated by remote control, that ran the same stretch in even less time: 48 minutes, 19 seconds.

As expected, there were some accidents in the race. Some robots fell down, others veered off the path, and several needed technical assistance along the way. While the physical performance of humanoid robots has advanced rapidly, their reliability is still developing. Of course, the laughter and jeers are no longer as frequent as they used to be, replaced by applause and exclamations of surprise.

The winning robot, “Blitz,” from smartphone manufacturer Honor was on display at the awards ceremony after the Beijing E-Town Robot Half Marathon.

Photograph: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images

Robot Superiority

Just like the robots that went viral for their impressive martial arts display a few weeks ago, this long-distance race is part of a broader strategy by China to show off its leadership in the development of advanced robots.

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You don’t need to be a robotics expert to see that this achievement demonstrates that machines can outperform humans at specific physical tasks under controlled conditions. (It’s hard to imagine that the winning robot could achieve the same result, for example, if it started to rain during the race.) But humans still have a few tricks up their sleeve: Running in a straight line is very different from performing complex real-world activities, such as manipulating delicate objects or interacting socially.

However, it’s understandable that the image of a robot crossing the finish line in record time, ahead of human athletes, raises several questions. Is this the beginning of a new era in which machines redefine physical limits?

One could argue that a car is a machine, and those have always been faster than humans. But a humanoid robot is designed to mimic humans. It’s more alarming to see one beat humanity at its own game—even if so many of them are still tripping over themselves.

This story originally appeared in WIRED en Español and has been translated from Spanish.

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