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Codex CLI 0.164 Starts Masking Your Credentials
OpenAI's Codex CLI 0.164.0 masks credentials in supported remote Bash and Zsh snapshot sessions and adds sign-in for enterprise MCP servers. It also brings ten prompt presets, inline /model and /permissions arguments, and fixes for compaction and session resume.
Alex Rivera · Oct 23, 2026 · 8 min read
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OpenAI shipped Codex CLI 0.164.0 on October 23. The headline change is that Codex now masks credentials during supported remote Bash commands and Zsh snapshot sessions, including credentials from custom providers.
Terminal agents read whatever your shell prints. Masking secrets before they reach the transcript closes one of the quieter leak paths in agentic coding.
Image: GitHub, openai/codex release rust-v0.164.0, October 23, 2026.
The security changes
Credential masking is scoped. The release notes say supported remote Bash commands and Zsh snapshot sessions. Do not read it as a guarantee that every secret in every shell is hidden.
Enterprise MCP connections can now authenticate with eligible Codex account grants or a dedicated sign-in, including OAuth clients that require a client secret. That removes a reason to paste long-lived tokens into MCP config files.
Sandbox checks were hardened against case-variant metadata paths on macOS and replaceable symlinks used to locate executables. And queued prompts now wait for pending permission choices to resolve, so a queued message cannot run ahead of an approval you have not given yet.
The workflow changes
Ten numbered /presets slots store reusable prompts and slash commands, with a keyboard menu. Inline arguments let /model set the model, reasoning effort, and speed in one command, and /permissions switch profiles the same way. Terminals with Kitty or Sixel graphics can preview viewed and generated images in the fullscreen transcript. The Amazon Bedrock setup wizard is now on by default.
The fixes worth knowing
A failed compaction no longer leaves a partial summary in history, and background compaction failures fall back instead of panicking. Resumed sessions now find compressed histories and restore saved thread settings instead of replacing them with global defaults. Config overrides passed with -c or --config at several subcommand levels are preserved. Windows users behind authenticating proxies get Negotiate and NTLM support.
What to do this week
Upgrade, then check your permission profiles after a resume. Before this release, a resumed thread could fall back to global defaults, which may have been looser or stricter than you intended. Move team-standard prompts into presets. And if any script still pins gpt-5.5 for ChatGPT-authenticated Codex, update it: OpenAI retired that model from Codex for ChatGPT sign-ins on October 14 and points users to gpt-6.1-sol.
Sources
https://github.com/openai/codex/releases/tag/rust-v0.164.0
https://learn.chatgpt.com/docs/changelog