OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT Head Tibo Completes Codex Quota Reset Following Vote
Thibault Sottiaux, head of OpenAI Codex and ChatGPT, confirmed that although the second-day update of Codex was rated good to very good, the community vote still requested a quota reset, which has now been completed. He also noted that after recalibrating, it seems that the current rules favor resets.
This vote was conducted under the 28-day rule he established on October 4. The rule states that each day, either a clear improvement must be delivered to the majority of Codex and Work users, or a full quota reset must occur. On the second day, he first delivered four items, then opened the vote with options for the four updates, a reset, or both. He later accepted the vote and announced that the reset had been processed.
The four items are: automatic approval "Approve for me" included without consuming quota, which occupies about 2% to 10% of the plan and is said to be more beneficial for users. The developer interface has been simplified. Meeting minutes have been integrated into the product. The Decisions interface for developers has been launched and will be used back in applications to improve the experience. He also mentioned that the model solved several important mathematical problems, and the team has written an article about it, but this is unrelated to the day's feature release.
He did not specify which accounts were covered in this confirmation. His previous similar announcements often pointed to paid users. On August 31, he reset all ChatGPT Work and Codex paid subscription quotas citing 25 million active users. After a brief outage on September 26, he reset all paid user quotas for Codex and ChatGPT Work again, mentioning that the team had a backup Codex used during the outage.
The community refers to these resets announced by his personal account as Tibo resets. In earlier interviews, he mentioned that initial resets were compensations for product failures, configuration errors, or substandard experiences, which later became a community meme, and there is indeed a physical reset button on the table. Full resets, banked resets that can be redeemed in accounts, and credits purchased separately are not the same type of quota.
This is a vote for exchanging computing power for features, not for adjusting pricing pages. The voting party consists of heavy users of Codex and Work who use the five-hour and weekly quotas, while the supplier is OpenAI's reasoning capacity. The four features have already been delivered, yet the community still chose to reset, indicating that the marginal value of incremental features is lower than a new round of quotas. Benefiting are the paid users who can continue running long tasks that day. The pressure is on OpenAI's computing cost and the release rhythm of "first release features, then release quotas."
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Sottiaux's announcement is not a temporary benefit. His public resume states that he is responsible for Codex and ChatGPT at OpenAI. On August 31, 2026, he reset all paid quotas for ChatGPT Work and Codex, citing 25 million active users, and referred to himself as the "reset company." After the outage on September 26, he reset the same batch of paid users again, mentioning that there was a backup Codex used during the outage. On October 4, he established a 28-day rule, requiring either a majority user improvement or a full reset each day.
What he mobilizes is not new subscriptions, but already sold usage windows. Automatic approval being included in the plan without consuming quota effectively removes 2% to 10% of plan usage from billing. Meeting minutes, simplified interfaces, and the Decisions interface keep developers within the application. The execution of a reset after a failed vote indicates that the functionality did not buy the right to "not reset today." Quotas thus become a second currency independent of the feature roadmap.
Similar structures have long existed in service compensations from cloud vendors. Amazon Web Services and Cloudflare use service credits to compensate for outages, while Twitch and gaming platforms use drops to compensate for downtime. The difference is that Codex has turned compensation into a votable daily mechanism, announced by a personal account rather than a status page. The industry phase has shifted from competing for programming agent feature lists to competing for who can continuously supply long task quotas. Features can be updated daily, but the five-hour window remains a hard constraint.
The essence is the transfer of pricing power. Subscription pricing determines access rights, while resets determine how much can still be run that day. Users vote to tell OpenAI that the four updates rated as good to very good do not outweigh a round of resets. The rules have been written by him to favor resets, shifting capacity from the product team's release list to the community's immediate valuation of scarce quotas. The button can be pressed because computing power is still scarcer than the new interface.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
Features can be updated daily, but quotas are hard currency.
The vote selects not the best, but the most needed.
Once compensation is votable, it becomes pricing.