OpenAI launches Computer History, logging Mac clicks and keystrokes

OpenAI has switched on a feature called Computer History in the ChatGPT app for macOS, and it records what you click and type inside the apps and websites you approve. The company announced it on 13 August in the desktop app changelog. It’s off by default, and access is limited to Pro, Business and Enterprise accounts.

The mechanism is an event log rather than a screen recorder, which is the detail that decides how you should feel about it. OpenAI’s own documentation describes what gets written down, and the wording is unusually direct.

Computer History creates an interaction-event stream from allowed apps and websites. Events can include clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and context that MacOS exposes through its accessibility system.

OpenAI, Computer History documentation

Those events get turned into text summaries and local memory files, which ChatGPT and Codex can then reference when you ask for something. That’s what makes it useful for developers, because a coding agent that already knows which file you edited last saves you a round of explaining. It’s also what makes it a bigger surface than ordinary chat memory.

What it doesn’t take is the part OpenAI keeps repeating. There are no screenshots, no screen recordings, no microphone input and no system audio. Ari Weinstein, a product and engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that content in incognito or private browser tabs gets ignored automatically. The Verge called it reminiscent of Windows Recall without the screenshots, which is roughly right, though Microsoft’s feature was the one that made screen capture the thing people argued about.

Item	What OpenAI says
Captured	Clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, macOS accessibility context
Not captured	Screenshots, screen recordings, microphone input, system audio, private browsing
Raw event files	Held on the Mac for up to 48 hours
Memory files	Stored locally until you delete them, and not encrypted
Accounts	Pro, Business and Enterprise, off by default
Not yet available	EEA, Switzerland, United Kingdom

The feature replaces Chronicle, the research preview OpenAI launched in April 2026, which did rely on screenshots. OpenAI describes Computer History as a rebuilt system rather than a rename, and says it uses fewer tokens and offers more privacy controls than Chronicle did. Raw interaction events sit on your Mac for up to 48 hours, get processed on OpenAI’s servers into memories, and aren’t retained afterwards or used for training.

The catch is what stays behind. The generated memory files are plain text, they live on your disk until you delete them, and OpenAI is blunt about the exposure.

They are not encrypted by Computer History, and other programs running as your macOS user may be able to access them.

OpenAI, Computer History documentation

That matters because the threat model shifts from OpenAI to everything else running on your machine. ZDNet flagged the same gap, noting that the lack of encryption is a concern and that excluding unwanted sources is the response. OpenAI’s own wording is that other programs running as your macOS user may be able to reach the files, so the defence is choosing what feeds the history in the first place.

Control sits in a few places at once. You pick which apps and websites contribute, you can pause collection or clear it, and each timeline item shows its own memory file with a delete option. On Business and Enterprise plans an administrator has to grant access before anyone can opt in, which is the sort of governance layer European rules tend to ask about first.

The EEA, Switzerland and the UK aren’t in the launch, and OpenAI hasn’t given a public reason. ZDNet reports those regions follow in the next few weeks, while OpenAI’s documentation still lists them as unavailable. Watch that gap: if a keystroke-level activity log takes months rather than weeks to clear those markets, the delay says more about the feature than the changelog does.