I am reporting this because I believe there is a serious Codex billing bug, and I want to know if other users have experienced the same thing or know how to get this properly investigated.
Between July 29 and July 31, 2026, around 70 separate ($1500+) Codex credit purchases were charged to my payment method. I never enabled Auto top-up, never knowingly activated automatic credit purchasing and never expected Codex to be able to keep buying credits by itself. I opened OpenAI Support case #13581367 and have been trying for weeks to explain that my complaint is not about whether Codex later used the credits. The problem is that the purchases happened in the first place.
Support keeps explaining negative balances, concurrent Codex usage and that later purchases can cover a negative balance. Their latest answer was: “The repeated credit purchases were triggered automatically by continued Codex usage. Auto top-up does not need to be enabled for this to occur, and a separate authorization is not required for each individual purchase.” For me, that statement describes the bug/problem rather than solving it. If Auto top-up is OFF, why can Codex repeatedly charge a payment method automatically? I did not manually make around 70 purchases and I did not knowingly give Codex permission to continue purchasing credits whenever the balance ran out.
OpenAI is refusing a refund because Codex consumed the credits directly. But if the system automatically purchases credits and then Codex automatically consumes them, saying they were consumed does not answer whether those purchases were authorized. I have also found several other users reporting very similar problems with unexpected Codex charges, Auto top-up behaviour and repeated purchases while Codex jobs continued running. That makes me concerned this is not an isolated billing dispute but a wider Codex billing issue that needs technical investigation.
At the moment help.openai.com is getting me nowhere. Support keeps giving variations of the same answer and has now said no further escalation is required. I have repeatedly asked them to show me where and when I authorized automatic purchases while Auto top-up was disabled, but I still have not received an answer. I also had a long ChatGPT conversation documenting this case and similar reports, which has now disappeared from my normal history/sidebar and I have not been able to find it again.
Has anyone else had Codex automatically purchase credits while Auto top-up was OFF? Did you manage to get the issue escalated beyond normal support? Is there a Codex billing/engineering contact, bug-report route or other OpenAI channel that can actually investigate the transaction and account logs? Any help from other users who experienced this would be appreciated.
OpenAI Support case: #13581367