Some time around July 12, the rolling 5-hour usage window that governs Codex on Plus, Pro, and Business quietly stopped applying. The weekly limit is still there. The short-term one, the one that strands you mid-session with quota still sitting in your account, is not being enforced.
OpenAI has not announced this. There is no changelog entry, no release note, no post. The public record of a change to how every paying Codex user is metered consists of people noticing that a number vanished from their own dashboard.
What users are actually reporting
The clearest account is Discussion #32632, titled “5 hour usage limit no longer visible in Codex Desktop App.” A day later, on July 13, a separate report landed as issue #32791: “Five-hour Codex usage limit disappeared from Plus account; only weekly limit is shown.” That issue is still open, and at the time of writing it carries four comments.
Both describe the same thing from the user side — the 5-hour figure is simply gone from the usage display, while the weekly figure remains. Neither is a maintainer statement. Neither confirms scope, mechanism, or duration. They are users describing their own screens, which is the only evidence anyone outside OpenAI currently has.
Press coverage followed on July 13. Digital Trends reported the cap lifted across Codex and ChatGPT Work, and BleepingComputer framed it as a temporary relaxation tied to GPT-5.6 Sol demand. Both reports use the word temporarily. That word does not appear to come from a written OpenAI commitment anyone can link to, and we would treat the duration of this as unknown rather than as a promised window.
The part that is actually verifiable
We checked. As of July 14, the official Codex changelog contains no entry for this change. Every entry from July 2026 is either a CLI point release or a mobile app build. The only limit-related entries anywhere in the changelog’s history are from 2025 and concern unrelated model launches.
This is not a small omission. A usage cap is not a cosmetic detail — it is the constraint people plan their working day around, the thing they buy a Pro subscription to move. It changed for every paying tier, and the surface OpenAI maintains specifically to tell you what changed does not mention it.
Why it probably happened, and what we do not know
There is a plausible mechanism, and it is worth separating from the reporting.
In April, at three million weekly Codex users, Sam Altman said OpenAI would reset usage limits and would keep doing so at every additional million users, up to ten million. That pledge is a matter of public record and has been honored repeatedly since. Codex has grown fast enough that the milestones now arrive in clusters, and a limit reset arriving alongside a cap suspension is consistent with that pledge rather than a departure from it.
What we cannot tell you is which milestone this one attaches to, because the reporting does not agree. Within the same week, outlets have put Codex at six million, seven million, and eight million weekly users. We are not going to pick one and print it. OpenAI has published no milestone post we can point to, and a number that three outlets disagree about is not a fact — it is a rumor with a decimal point. If OpenAI publishes a figure, we will update this piece with it.
We also do not know whether the cap is suspended, removed, raised beyond visibility, or simply not rendering in the UI while still being enforced somewhere. “The number disappeared from my dashboard” and “the limit is not being applied” are different claims, and the public evidence only supports the first.
What this changes for you
If you have been structuring long Codex sessions around the 5-hour window — splitting work, waiting out a reset, pinning heavy multi-agent runs to the start of a fresh bucket — that constraint is not currently biting. The weekly limit still is, and it is the one that will stop you now.
Treat this as a window, not a new baseline. Nothing about it has been committed to in writing, which means nothing about it has been committed to. Build habits around the weekly number, which has not moved.
We have updated our limits reference to reflect the current state and flagged the parts that are now in question. We will revise this story the moment OpenAI says anything on the record — and if the changelog picks it up late, we will note that too.