OpenAI Codex weekly active users cross 20 million as Claude Code growth drops to 5.2%
On Aug 22 OpenAI Codex lead Tibo confirmed on X that Codex weekly active users crossed 20 million, with paid subscribers receiving a one-time banked reset credit. TickerTrends shows Claude Code growth slowing to 5.2% in the same window.
On August 22, OpenAI Codex lead Tibo confirmed on X that Codex weekly active users had officially crossed the 20 million mark, in line with internal OpenAI data earlier cited by CNBC. To mark the milestone, engineering lead Thibault Sottiaux announced that every paid Codex and ChatGPT Work subscriber would receive a one-time banked reset credit they can use at their own pace.
The growth curves have diverged sharply. TickerTrends data shows Codex's four-week WAU growth reached 20.8%, nearly four times Claude Code's 5.2% over the same window. From February through June, Claude Code led the coding-tools category, with annualized revenue climbing from $2.5B to $14B over four months. Growth slowed significantly in July for the first time. Codex got an additional tailwind from the July 9 GPT-5.6 Sol launch, and roughly 20% of Codex users are knowledge workers such as analysts, marketers, designers and investors, a segment that is growing three times faster than the developer base.
OpenAI is also crediting every Codex and ChatGPT Work user with a banked reset, responding to persistent paid-subscriber complaints about the transparency and speed of usage-limit recovery. Business Insider previously reported that OpenAI has been quietly testing an $8 pay-to-reset button for Plus subscribers. An OpenAI spokesperson told the outlet the company is exploring ways for users who hit their quotas to buy additional usage.
Claude Code's slowdown has not undermined Anthropic's broader business. Anthropic posted $11.6B in Q2 revenue, surpassing OpenAI's $6.7B for the first time on a quarterly basis, with an annualized revenue run rate of roughly $65B. Claude Code accounts for an estimated 75-85% of Anthropic's revenue from enterprise API calls, and more than 1,000 enterprise clients including Amazon, Google and JPMorgan pay Anthropic more than $1M annually. A Jefferies test in August found Codex and Claude Code roughly even on mixed office-and-coding workloads, with no clear winner on pure programming tasks.