Codex encrypts sub-agent prompts, sparking debate over AI audit trails vs. access control

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On July 14, a change to OpenAI's Codex began encrypting orchestrator-to-sub-agent payloads, replacing previously readable task records with ciphertext. The update drew significant attention on Hacker News, accumulating over 400 points and 240 comments in a single day. A related bug report, filed as openai/codex#28058, flagged the loss of the plaintext audit trail that developers had relied on to review sub-agent instructions after dispatch. A developer responding to the issue argued that restoring the readable log would recover visibility but not control, and that the two concerns were conflated in public discussion. As an alternative, they proposed a pre-dispatch authorization gate that checks a child agent's permissions against the parent's policy before any handoff occurs, while the spawn plan is still readable in memory.

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