OpenAI's Computer History turns your Mac app usage into ChatGPT timelines

OpenAI has rolled out Computer History, a new opt-in feature for the ChatGPT Mac app that records your activity across apps and websites to create an AI-powered timeline of your work. Designed for Pro, Business, and Enterprise accounts, it replaces the earlier Chronicle feature and deliberately avoids screenshots: instead, it builds an interaction-event stream from clicks, typing, keyboard shortcuts, app switches, and other context exposed through macOS's accessibility system. Those events are periodically condensed into text summaries and local memory files, which are then organized by day and time in a timeline within ChatGPT. From there, you can ask questions like "What was I working on before my last break?" or "Give me a list of tasks I've worked on today and their status," resume unfinished work, and even turn repeatable workflows into new skills for Codex and other ChatGPT tools. OpenAI says Computer History uses fewer tokens than Chronicle and provides stronger privacy controls, though the feature requires the Memories option to be enabled.

Setting it up is straightforward: in the ChatGPT Mac app, go to Settings > Integrations > Computer History, turn it on, review the privacy details, and choose which apps and websites to include before granting the necessary macOS permissions. The rollout is global in most regions now, with the UK, Switzerland, and the European Economic Area following in a few weeks. Each timeline item shows a title, summary, source apps, a suggested skill, and options to delete it or view the memory file in Finder. While the productivity upside is clear—especially for people juggling research, coding, and document work—the feature also raises legitimate privacy questions. Because it captures your typing and app-switching behavior across your Mac, it's a continuous record of your digital workday that lives inside OpenAI's ecosystem. Users will need to weigh that convenience against how comfortable they are handing ChatGPT a detailed log of their daily activity, even if it never touches your screen or microphone.