OpenAI's plan as Google and Anthropic gain: a 'superapp'

OpenAI plans to combine its ChatGPT app, Codex coding platform, and Atlas browser into a single desktop "superapp," according to The Wall Street Journal, as the company moves to streamline resources and respond to competition from rival Anthropic.

Chief of Applications Fidji Simo will lead the effort. Greg Brockman, OpenAI's president and the person currently responsible for its computing work, will join Simo in managing the restructuring, an OpenAI spokeswoman said.

The superapp plan reverses a product strategy from last year that left the company scattered. OpenAI had rolled out multiple individual apps that drew an uneven response from users and pulled internal attention in different directions. In a note to employees, Simo described the result as a fragmentation that had slowed the company down and hurt product quality.

The centerpiece of the combined app will be what OpenAI calls "agentic" AI — tools designed to run independently on a computer and handle tasks ranging from coding to data analysis. In the near term, Codex will be expanded to handle productivity work beyond coding; ChatGPT and Atlas will be brought into the unified app in later phases. OpenAI said its ChatGPT mobile app is not part of the consolidation.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, and Simo have been conducting a review of the company's full product lineup over the past several weeks to determine what to cut or scale back, according to The Wall Street Journal. The Journal reported that Simo used an all-hands meeting to warn staff against "side quests," citing Anthropic's gains among enterprise and developer clients as the reason for the sharper focus. OpenAI has described its current posture internally as a "code red," a spokeswoman said.

OpenAI is competing with Anthropic for enterprise customers — companies buying AI tools to improve employee productivity. Enterprise sales had not been a priority for OpenAI at the outset, but the company has pivoted toward that market as Anthropic's Claude Code and Cowork have taken hold with developers and business customers. Each company has floated the prospect of going public by year's end and faces pressure to hit aggressive revenue milestones promised to investors.

Anthropic's enterprise gains have been significant. Anthropic's revenue stood at roughly $9 billion annualized at the close of 2025 and had reportedly approached $20 billion by early March. Its portion of enterprise AI spending climbed to 40% over that stretch, while OpenAI's share of the same market fell from roughly half to about 27%. A blog post from Anthropic asserting that Claude Code could modernize COBOL-based systems sent IBM's market value down by about $40 billion in a single trading session.

The company said bringing everything under one roof will break down silos between teams and let its researchers concentrate on a single product rather than many. Simo described the consolidation as a way to pair the company's consumer AI brand with its strongest agentic tools and extend those capabilities more broadly.