How OpenAI hardened Codex against destructive file deletions

Hi! Recapping some changes we have rolled out over the last couple of weeks that have further reduced the risk associated to potentially destructive actions being performed by Codex during its work. A few weeks ago, we started investigating a small number of reports where GPT-5.6 in Codex took destructive actions outside what the user asked for. The most serious pattern we found was a command meant to clean up temporary work that could instead delete the user files. This should obviously not happen. Here’s what we found: - Codex sometimes creates temporary folders while working and cleans them up afterward. In rare cases, GPT-5.6 got that cleanup wrong. One pattern involved reusing a system environment variable like $HOME for temporary work. A malformed cleanup command could then point at the actual home directory instead of the temporary folder. - There were cases where the model tried to delete or overwrite a temporary path without checking what was already there. We’ve added protections at several layers: - Codex is now explicitly instructed to check deletion targets before acting, create fresh temporary directories, avoid repurposing system environment variables, prefer…