OpenAI's forthcoming "superapp" is one of the worst-kept secrets in AI right now.

During a walk in San Francisco last month, I told The Deep View CEO, Faris Kojok, that the most challenging part of using OpenAI's products was switching between the three desktop apps. Apparently, I wasn't the only one thinking that, because less than a week later, reports began circulating that the company would merge the three apps into a single superapp.

Since then, the OpenAI team has been publicly discussing it on Twitter and in podcasts. The most prominent of which was when President Greg Brockman appeared on the Big Technology Podcast and told Alex Kantrowitz when and how the new superapp would be rolled out.

"We're taking incremental steps to get there. Over the next couple months, we should have shipped the complete vision … but it's going to come in pieces," said Brockman. "The place that we're starting today is with the Codex app, which is really two things in one. It's a general agent harness that knows how to use tools, and it's also an agent that knows how to write software. That general agent harness can be used for so many different things… So we're going to make the Codex app so much more usable for general knowledge work."

Why would OpenAI bring the three apps together? First, let's look at what they do.

• ChatGPT desktop app: This is the traditional ChatGPT app that has been around for the past several years. It makes it easy to view and search all of your past chats and organize them into projects. You can also quickly search for custom GPTs and apps to extend the chatbot's functionality by adding features from tools like Photoshop, Canva, insurance apps, and hiring apps.
• Atlas web browser: In October 2025, OpenAI launched the ChatGPT Atlas web browser. Following in the footsteps of Perplexity Comet, launched in mid-2025, OpenAI built its browser on Google's open-source Chromium platform, which runs most of the web. Very quickly, Atlas became my preferred way to use ChatGPT for one simple reason: its ability to open multiple tabs, keeping several different queries quickly accessible.
• Codex app: As Brockman noted, the app has two parts. Most people think of it as a coding tool. But the second part is a general-purpose agent that can carry out tasks for you. And that's where the combination of a web browser and an AI agent gets interesting. If you can open multiple instances of ChatGPT in tabs, then you can use your Codex agent to carry out various tasks, all at the same time.

Our Deeper View

The concept of a superapp has been a common refrain in the tech industry for years. The first successful one was China's WeChat app, which combined text messaging, video calling, file sharing, digital payments, and mini apps that add ride-hailing, food delivery, and event ticketing. That's what Elon Musk wanted to create when he bought Twitter. But what OpenAI is doing is a little different: it's not on mobile, but on the computer, where knowledge workers do almost all their work. When the superapp combines the search and organizing capabilities of the traditional ChatGPT app with the multitasking environment of Atlas and the agentic automation of Codex, it could transform ChatGPT into a product much more akin to OpenClaw—but accessible to its 900 million users.