Codex Passes 7M Users, +1M in a Day — May Have Overtaken Claude Code in Coding-Agent Usage

Summary

OpenAI's Codex reached roughly 7 million active users as of July 13, 2026, adding about 1 million users in a single day (July 12–13) and marking ~10x growth over six months from a ~550K–700K base at the start of the year. Latent Space's AINews frames this as the moment Codex plausibly overtook Anthropic's Claude Code in raw coding-agent usage: the last comparable Claude Code figure — ~2M users and $2.5B ARR — dates to Anthropic's February funding announcement, and Anthropic has gone comparativel