OpenAI’s Codex, the company’s agent product, now lets you remotely take over a locked and blacked-out Mac from your phone — fully blind to anyone looking at the physical screen.
https://twitter.com/OpenAIDevs/status/2057536706778378692
To make this work while the machine stays locked, Codex installs an Apple-authorized low-level assistive plugin in macOS that taps deep into the system unlock flow. When you initiate a control request from your mobile device, the plugin quietly and temporarily unlocks the system in the background to run the target application. During this window, the plugin blocks all local keyboard and mouse input, and projects a pure black overlay across every connected display. The screen stays physically black and locked — completely blind to any onlooker.
This backdoor unlock channel is locked down with extreme security boundaries. It only opens during a short control session authenticated from the mobile side. No other local software or third-party process can access it. If the system detects any physical keyboard or mouse activity during an operation, it instantly triggers an alarm, revokes the background unlock, and brings back the lock screen — pausing all automated tasks until someone physically unlocks the machine.
For additional privilege-escalation protection, this mechanism is essentially a restricted invisible sandbox. It cannot take over terminal applications, affect Codex itself, silently execute sudo authentication, or approve system privacy prompts.