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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has declared a company-wide “code red,” telling staff to shift focus back to ChatGPT’s core quality as competition from Google’s Gemini 3 and Anthropic intensifies. The move pauses several monetization and product experiments and highlights growing pressure on OpenAI to defend its lead while funding massive infrastructure spending.
In an internal memo reported by multiple outlets, Altman asked employees to concentrate on ChatGPT’s “day-to-day experience.” He highlighted the need for faster responses, greater reliability, stronger personalization, and the ability to handle a broader range of questions.
To support this, OpenAI will hold daily calls for teams working on ChatGPT and encourage temporary transfers so more engineers can join the effort. The company has also activated its highest internal escalation tier, “code red,” after earlier “yellow” and “orange” alerts flagged growing user dissatisfaction with response quality and accuracy.
Altman’s memo said OpenAI will delay several initiatives, including advertising experiments, AI agents for health and shopping, and a personal assistant product known as Pulse. OpenAI has not formally launched ads inside ChatGPT, but internal tests and code references suggest the company has explored shopping-linked ad formats and other commercial placements.
Nick Turley, head of ChatGPT, echoed the shift in a post on X, saying the team now aims to make ChatGPT “more intuitive and personal” while expanding access worldwide. He also described ChatGPT as the “#1 AI assistant worldwide” and said it already accounts for a significant share of search-like activity, although he did not define the exact metric.
The renewed focus on ChatGPT comes soon after Google released Gemini 3, its latest flagship AI model. Gemini 3 has topped OpenAI and Anthropic models on several public benchmarks and attracted strong early reviews, particularly for creative writing and its Nano Banana Pro image-generation system.
Google says its Gemini app now serves more than 650 million monthly users, up from 450 million a few months earlier, highlighting quick adoption across search, workspace tools, and cloud services. Large-enterprise executives have publicly praised Gemini 3’s capabilities, adding to the competitive pressure OpenAI faces in consumer and developer markets.
Anthropic has also expanded its client base with models positioned for safety-focused corporate deployments. Together, these launches indicate a shift from a single-leader dynamic toward a more crowded field in advanced AI assistants.
OpenAI’s ‘code red’ status shows growing doubts about the company’s economics. The firm continues to invest heavily in data centers and specialized hardware, often in partnership with Microsoft, while most ChatGPT users still access the service for free.
Financial projections shared with investors suggest OpenAI aims to reach about $20 billion in annual recurring revenue by the end of 2025 and grow to “hundreds of billions” by 2030 to support its plans. Recent disclosures also indicate substantial ongoing losses and a significant cash burn rate, prompting scrutiny of how quickly the company can convert its user base into sustainable revenue.
Altman’s memo framed the renewed focus on ChatGPT as central to that path. By improving quality, reliability, and personalization, OpenAI aims to retain hundreds of millions of users, defend its position in the AI assistant market, and build a stronger foundation before returning to ad products, agents, and new monetization strategies.
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