Keep Mac Awake

Keep Mac Awake is a native menu bar app for Macs with Apple silicon on macOS 26 or later. Close the lid, not the work: it keeps a MacBook awake with the lid closed, with no external display, keyboard or mouse, for a session you start (no limit, 1 hour, 8 hours or your own number of hours). When the session ends, normal sleep comes back.

Made for people who leave work running on a closed MacBook: AI coding agents such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI running overnight, long builds, renders, downloads and backups, remote control from a phone, SSH into a closed Mac.

AC power by default; battery is optional, with a floor you pick. Agents can start and stop a session themselves with the keepmacawake command and its JSON output.

Here: short films of the real app and how-tos for keeping a closed MacBook awake safely.

Free trial and guides: keepmacawake.com