While Anthropic is busy sorting out its model pricing, OpenAI is tidying up its own interface. On July 18, OpenAI rolled out an update to the ChatGPT Business desktop app that pulls together three things that used to sit side by side: Chat, Work and Codex.
What’s new
A global switcher now cleanly separates ChatGPT and Codex. Inside ChatGPT, you pick between Chat for quick questions and Work for tasks meant to be completed end to end.
On top of that come a few housekeeping changes that matter more in daily use than they sound:
- Unified Recents: Chat and Work conversations now live together in one list — sortable, filterable, pinnable.
- Projects in desktop: Your existing ChatGPT Projects now show up in the app.
- Cross-device sync: Cloud Work conversations sync across web, mobile and desktop. Start on one surface, continue on the next.
It’s live now for all plans on macOS and Windows. It’s part of the bigger reshuffle in which OpenAI folded the standalone Codex app into the ChatGPT desktop app. On the same day, there was also a Codex fix: the bundled instructions for the GPT-5.6 models Sol, Terra and Luna were repaired, and the 272,000-token context window restored.
My take
This isn’t a spectacular announcement — and that’s exactly why it’s worth noting. Because it’s the same move Anthropic is making: everything under one roof. In Claude, Chat, Cowork and Code now live in one place, with shared projects and artifacts. OpenAI is following suit with ChatGPT, Work and Codex.
The interesting part, for me, is the cross-device sync. The trend is clearly shifting away from “I sit at one machine and type” toward “I start a task here and pick up the result there.” Cowork set the pace; ChatGPT Work is catching up. If you bounce between laptop, phone and web a lot, you notice these small things right away.
Which leaves the sober truth: consolidation updates like this don’t win headlines, but they decide whether a tool feels coherent day to day or frayed at the edges. And that’s increasingly where the assistant wars are being fought — not just on the model, but on everything around it.
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