Codex Cli Agent can't browse the web

Resolved 💬 10 comments Opened Dec 21, 2025 by styler-ai Closed Jan 11, 2026

💡 Likely answer: A maintainer (etraut-openai, contributor) responded on this thread — see the highlighted reply below.

What version of Codex is running?

0.77

What subscription do you have?

pro

Which model were you using?

codex 5.2

What platform is your computer?

Windows 11

What issue are you seeing?

Codex cli with codex gpt5.2 max xhigh can't browse the web even with web_search_request = true I am on windows.

What steps can reproduce the bug?

ask codex cli to open a URL. It then tries to write a new pythin script every time to access the website

What is the expected behavior?

that it doesn't write a new python script every time

Additional information

_No response_

View original on GitHub ↗

10 Comments

styler-ai · 7 months ago

could be the same issue as: https://github.com/openai/codex/issues/8356

mgryning · 6 months ago

I can confirm this. Codex can browse web fine via playright mcp or similar, but not by itself-- and it seems it cannot call any external URL altogether in WSL2, which makes running a server in a background process pretty difficult.

VincentBai-dotcom · 6 months ago

From the list of tools that get registered it seems there's no such a tool that does web search: https://github.com/openai/codex/blob/main/codex-rs/core/src/tools/spec.rs?utm_source=chatgpt.com#L983. Possibly because the web search tool is proprietary and is not exposed to the public.

mgryning · 6 months ago

I think it’s not only a tool issue. My Codex cannot resolve dns / call external urls with curl, but if I exit codex and call directly in wsl2 it works fine

adgower · 6 months ago

same problem windows 11 .77

eeshansrivastava89 · 6 months ago

This fix worked for me: added the below in: ~/.codex/config.toml -- on MacOS

[features]
web_search_request = true

Didn't have to do it earlier, and web search had stopped working for me as reported in #8575. This fixes it.

etraut-openai contributor · 6 months ago

For those of you who are not using Windows native, set web_search_request = true in your config file to enable web searches.

If you are using Windows native, make sure to also enable the Windows experimental sandbox or switch to WSL, which uses the Linux sandbox mechanism.

styler-ai · 6 months ago

For those of you who are not using Windows native, set web_search_request = true in your config file to enable web searches. If you are using Windows native, make sure to also enable the Windows experimental sandbox or switch to WSL, which uses the Linux sandbox mechanism.

Will it also be possible to let codex browse the web just with the flag setto true on windows in the future?

etraut-openai contributor · 6 months ago

Will it also be possible to let codex browse the web just with the flag setto true on windows in the future?

Yes, in the future, the Windows sandbox will be enabled by default.

styler-ai · 6 months ago

ticket can be closed. i enabled the experimental windows sandbox, it works also with full access