OpenAI Silently Ships LibreOffice Inside Its Desktop App

If your disk space suddenly shrank by 1.7GB, blame ChatGPT's desktop app.

Developer Simon Willison noticed something unexpected while checking his system cache: OpenAI silently bundled a full copy of LibreOffice into the ChatGPT desktop app (formerly Codex). Tucked inside ~/.cache/ is a 1.7GB runtime folder containing Python, Node.js, git, Poppler, and native LibreOffice binaries. Built-in skill files tell the model how to trigger those tools to render and convert documents locally.

Why it matters: OpenAI is shifting heavy file processing to your machine. Instead of uploading your documents to a cloud server to convert them, the desktop app uses local open-source tools to do the work on your device. It makes document handling fast, but it quietly costs a slice of your drive.

Know this: You can inspect the bundled tools and skill definitions yourself in ~/.cache/codex-runtimes/.

Turns out the newest AI features still rely on an open-source office suite forked back in 2010.