Does ChatGPT stop when your laptop sleeps?

When you send a message or ask ChatGPT to run a long tool-use task, the actual work — generating the response, running code in its sandbox, browsing the web — happens on OpenAI's infrastructure. Your laptop is just the window you're viewing it through.

That means your laptop sleeping doesn't pause the underlying computation the way it would for a locally-running agent like Claude Code or Cursor. What it affects is your connection to it — if your tab disconnects mid-stream, you may come back to find the response finished and saved (most of the time), or in some cases a response that was still actively generating when the connection dropped may not have fully saved — behavior here isn't something we can promise with certainty since it depends on OpenAI's own infrastructure, not anything this tool controls.

If you want to watch a long ChatGPT response or agent task complete in real time without your screen locking partway through — the most common reason people land here — that's exactly what this does: keeps the display active and visible for as long as you need, with a duration picker if you'd rather it release automatically after a set time than run indefinitely.

If your actual goal is making sure a long task finishes even if you walk away entirely, the more relevant question is whether you're running something locally (see ourAI agent page for what actually controls that) or working within ChatGPT's own product, where OpenAI's infrastructure — not your laptop's power state — determines whether a task keeps running.